The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 508: Not Your Daddy's Farm

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Will Harris, Janis Putelis, Randall Williams, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: Will's new book, A Bold Return To Giving a Damn; go visit and explore the White Oak Pastures farm; ask a farmer; 6th generations; Jani’s daughter’s first buck; tears of joy; when you're eager to see what's in the stomach; dry firing on everything; a write in from a surveyor and how corners aren't usually accurate; a link between smaller jaws and sleep apnea?; from calf to cooked; "supper" over "dinner"; a closed cyclical system; the dung beetle as MVP; natural chicks with large testicles; slaughtering your own herd year round; managing for the benefit of one animal may be to the detriment of another; greenwashing; peanut shells in huge compost piles; and more. Outro music: “Selling The Farm” by Houston, Texas group Polecat Rodeo. Music by Mark Meent, lyrics by Dan Fields, arrangement by Mark Meents and Blake Abbott. Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Okay, everybody, this episode is dedicated to Doug Dern. Oh, he's going to eat this up. This whole thing?

Oh, dude, it's Doug Dern's dream. That's because this is a special edition called Ask a Farmer. But it's not any farmer. We're joined by Will Harris, fourth generation farmer of White Oak Pastures in Georgia, now author of a book, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food. Will Harris is the owner of White Oak Pastures,

a holistically managed regenerative ranch and farm in Georgia's semi-tropical coastal plain. You guys raise how many different kinds of animals? Ten. Lay them out for me real quick. Cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, and five poultry species. Chickens, turkeys, geese, guineas, and ducks. And you run your farm like an ecosystem.

It is an ecosystem, yes. And you live recognizing that. And we're going to get into great detail on this, but you guys' family's been on the farm since 1860. Yeah. Was it 1860 or 66? 66. I'm the fourth generation.

Never left, never sold. You guys just been there. We've been there. My daughters are the fifth, and they've got five little beady children generation. Never left, never sold. You guys just been there. We've been there. My daughters are the fifth and they've got, uh, five little beady children who are the sixth. So the sixth generation is on. But the sixth generation hadn't contributed yet. They don't do nothing.

They don't do nothing. Well, it's just a testament to kids these days, right? But their parents, their, their, their, their parents are producers. Got it. Um, our connection, we have the same agent. Their parents are producers. Got it. Our connection, we have the same agent, Mark Gerald. Yeah, he's great. Did Mark find you?

He did. He contacted us. That's what happened to me 27 years ago. And I told him that I couldn't write a book. I didn't know how to read a book. But he persisted and found somebody. That ain't know how to read a book. He persisted and found somebody. That ain't going to stop him. No. He don't stop him.

He's in it to win it. When I met Mark, I thought I had it all figured out. I was living in Wyoming at the time and I was already writing a book and I got a call from my editor outside magazine. She's like, hey, there's this agent looking for you. I was like, shit, I already got an agent.

And he was persistent, man. He got a hold of me, and he's basically like, here's how we're going to do this. So he hadn't changed a bit. Yeah, and he's like, this is, and I was like, oh, yeah, maybe someday I will do that. He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to do it right now.

Strictly business. Like week one, this will happen. Week two, this will happen. Week three, this, no. We're going to do it right now. Strictly business. Like week one, this will happen. Week two, this will happen. Week three, this will happen. I was like, oh, this ain't no. I actually told him. Start to be like work. Yeah.

I actually told him, no, thank you. I'm not interested. Really? And he talked to my daughter and she was interested and had me become interested. Mark went to my bachelor party. Did he? I had a week-long bachelor party. Well, none of those glommers.

I wasn't either. So we're going to get into all that. And it's going to be big time ask the farmer. I got some real farming questions for you. Yeah. About land management, animal welfare, why things were done the way they're done in the agricultural landscape for a long time. Why the agricultural landscape changed so much in the mid-1900s, right? Have I got the answer for you?

No. Why did ag change so much in the mid-1900s, and why are some farmers now beginning to look and think that maybe we had things more figured out in the old days than we do in the modern days in some of the trade-offs first we got to talk about a couple quick things and i'm going to ask you about just general wild uh wildlife um i'm a i'm a cow's not uh cow's not condos kind of environmental yeah Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I'm not letting you know what I mean.

There's like this whole faction of environmentalism that are anti-cow. Mm-hmm I'm not among them. They're good. Good. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm like, uh, I'm, I'm too, I'm much more pragmatic than that.

I'm gonna talk about wildlife on regenerative farms, clean farm practices, dirty farm practices. Right up my alley. Great. Um, we're gonna get to all that. Yanni, we first, Yanni, you wanted to, your daughter got her first buck. Right up my alley. Great. We're going to get to all that. Yanni, your daughter got her first buck. My daughter got her first buck. Yeah, yours after you kind of gave her first opportunity away to your son.

What do you mean? She got mad. Isn't that what happened? No, that's what she likes to think happened is not what happened. That's not what happened? When you told the story, that's how I understood it. The buck was kind of getting away. Did I tell this story?

Yeah. About her and the fossils? Yeah, and the buck is kind of getting away. And as opposed to being like, okay, we're just going to let him go over the ridge. We already did that once. We're going to get on him again. That already happened once. Okay, but you could do it again.

How many times are you going to bump a buck over the ridge and go find it again? Listen, I don't know. But instead, you said, Jimmy, shoot him. And shoot him hadn't even come out of your lips and the gun went off. And what she thought was her buck was now Jimmy's buck. Yeah, but he's kind of a wild bill, though. If you say get him, he's going to get him. I understand.

I understand. I understand. So you took her out again, and she got her first buck. Didn't even let her big brother come. I brought her and her little brother. I brought her and her little brother out, and we had a great little hunt. And on her sixth day, her sixth day of kind of more than that, if you count just camping and traveling, she put in her sixth day of, of actual, like real good wake up before it gets light out.

Hunting got a buck and she was ecstatic. The one mistake I made, um, she hit a good hitting lungs, ran up there too quick. I should have just said, let's just sit and wait a couple minutes. Oh, it was still, because it was still alive a little bit? Yeah, because then you get up there

and it's like, you know, I mean, right? Anything takes a minute to die. Sure. I mean, you know, usually. She hit it right, you know, she hit it through the lungs. Yeah. I should have said,

okay, now you wait a minute and we'll go up and have a look. And she'd have gone up and been like dead in her doornail. But instead we hustled right over there, and she caught it. You know how it all goes. Then I'm like, this always happens. It's like –

So was that part – I said normally people wait, and they don't even see that it happens, but we came up, and it just happens. They're going to breathe for a minute, and they're going to expire. And it's not that you did anything wrong. You did everything right, but you just witnessed the thing that would normally be out of sight

because it ran over the hill or you wait a minute. She got over it. She was pretty upset. Because she felt like she had done some extra harm. Didn't hit it right. Because she just thought they'd go like, like in Westerns.

Mm-hmm. You know, a guy falls off the railing and he just never even twitches. I think that's what she was expecting. Any tears? Oh, yeah. The ones associated with that moment or the tears of getting her first buck? No, tears of that she didn't hit it right. Yeah.

And made it suffer. Yeah. But then. Because Ina started crying a little bit. Yeah. And made it suffer. Yeah. But then. Because Ina started crying a little bit. And I was like, oh, no. What happened? What's going on? And she's just like, I just can't believe I did it.

You know? Like, pure joy. You know? But tears of joy. So, no. Yeah. I was texting with Corinne earlier about it. And she said, well did any mixed emotions

as none whatsoever just 100 like cool as a cucumber happy and walked right up to it was like great let's take some pictures pet it check it out no you know what i've a couple takeaways this is fresh in my mind because it was not even 24 hours ago, is how when kids are around these dead animals, they've seen a lot of them alive. They've seen our kids, a lot of them have seen a lot of them dead, but they go up to them and they are just touching and feeling and checking from one end to the other, nose to tail. Just like so, and I think, I don't know why, but as adults,

maybe it's because, you know, you've already done it a thousand times. And so you kind of skipped that part, but I didn't have to tell her to like, oh, take a minute and enjoy the moment. Like it was just naturally, she was just doing it, you know, look at the hide, look at the color, look how it's 10 different colors. But when you stand away from it blends into one and, you know, just all these observations and, you know, my daughter, you know, she gets going. There's a lot of words coming out of there. Maybe she's a future scientist.

Yeah. Artist. We'll see. At some point. My kids are always real eager to see what's in the stomach. Oh. And no amount of checking is going to ever convince them that it's the same older.

Totally. It's going to look like, it's going to look like someone's gonna look like it's gonna look like someone pulped a bunch of cilantro she pretty much gutted it herself i i did the i busted open the uh sternum for so that it'd be easier for her to see what she was doing right because at first i said yeah just reach in there grab the trachea cut it off with your other hand and yank it all out and she's like looking in there and you know you can't, cut it off with your other hand and yank it all out. And she's like, look it in there. And you know, you can't see anything. It's going to be all done by hand. So then I said, all right, let me cut it open. Then you can see what you got going.

But yeah, she does the whole thing and she's like, all right, let's get the heart and the liver. So she got that, it pointed her in the right direction there. And it's all said and done, buck splayed out, letting him drain. I'm getting ready to go get the truck. And she's like, can I cut the stomach open now? It's like they expect to find a little person in there or something. Yeah, I don't know what it is, but it's great to see that curiosity. Yeah. Man, I had so many observations

on my daughter, but the main one is a lot of stuff gets away. Oh, yeah. It wouldn't have got away normally. No. Well, there goes that opportunity. Due to what?

All the things. Oh, just you name it. You name it. It's just a lot It's a lot to get someone lined up It's just getting you know It's like it's over there And you gotta remember this

And then we did a thing too Dry firing Dry firing on it On the animal Just we dry firing everything Yeah Yeah no that's a great Great thing to do

We saw some you know Something with dough too far away We just dry fire on it Just to You know Yeah It's just It's anything that you do you know, something, a doe too far away, we'd just dry fire on it just to, you know. Yeah. It's just, it's anything that you do that's, I don't know, a skill like that.

In the beginning, it seems like it's so complicated. There's so many moving parts. There's so, you know, where you and I just will naturally just shift our whole body as you shift behind the gun. But for them, it's just not natural right it's it's that and it's just refining the animal in the scope and i mean she's an hour into the hunt she's like i think you would have already shot one i'm like yeah maybe um yeah there's just

there's just a lot but i think i noticed that too but at the same time i was watching her yesterday and i'm like man her muzzle control is i don't want to say impeccable but it's it's getting there and just like the way she handles the firearm is getting really good like there's no like looking at the bolt and going how does this thing work again right there's just been enough repetition where it's all you know clicking right along and can see, and even like dealing with it, even though she's never gutted one, she's been part of that enough and she's skinned enough

and done all those little pieces that it didn't take us that much longer than I would have gutted it. I mean, maybe 20 minutes instead of 10. But you can see, I think down the line, it won't be too long until hopefully if they keep practicing it that you won't even need to say anything. Just hold a leg, you know.

When you get into hunting technique, there's all these things like you can go on and you hear people talk about, you know, people, instructional people. They'll be like, oh, there's like fitness, you know. There's marksmanship. Man, there's a lot of other stuff that no one's put a name to and no one talks about but it's just how to be like what does a deer look like that ain't gonna stop what's the deer look like that's gonna stop in a second yeah you should be ready to shoot it's just all this stuff you're like you realize like no one's ever put this in the way no one's ever put in the words like what is a deer's demeanor?

You know, that deer is heading this way and he's clueless. That deer. Does that, does that deer see us? Is upset about something that happened a little while ago and he's kind of getting over it. Yeah. I always have a, I don't know what it was, but when I was at hunting last week or the week before, it was like every, every buck was kind of like tuned up.

And every time I'd be like, he sees us. And I'm like, no, he doesn't. He's just, you know, but it was like. He's upset about something earlier. Right. Or he's just keyed up and he happens to be looking in that direction. And I happen to be there and you watch him for a minute. And then all of a sudden he's looking somewhere else.

And he's given that bush the same look that he just gave me. Yeah. We were getting that a lot. That deer's looking, she's looking at us. I'm like, well, she is, but she's not. Yeah. Right. That's exactly.

She's looking at something past us. But if you wave your arms right now. It'll be looking at us. it won't be coincidental. I had some other observation. I was going to say, Oh, did you carry your daughter's gun? I did not.

I have. Yeah. Okay. In the past. See, I'm so much meaner to my boys than my daughter. So I was carrying my daughter's gun and my older boy found out. I heard him like,

I heard him be like he carries your gun are you kidding me i'm like yeah i don't know i'm nicer to her than i am to you uh real quick on the subject land ownership so to return to my favorite subject we've got more mileage out of the wyoming corner Crossing case than any other thing to ever happen. I've gotten a lot of great feedback from that podcast. Just texts saying how great it was to

hear him lay it all out. A lot of people, I was noticing because we have the video of that on YouTube. A lot of people watch that on YouTube. The Corner Crossing lawyer speaks out. Someone wrote in. A land surveyor wrote in, backing me up on a point.

I got one guy taking me to task, and I got one guy backing me up. This is him writing. In response to your recent episode with the lawyer from the Corner Crossers, I think it's important to get a little insight from a land surveyor my percent my profession for quite some time now there's something steve said in that episode and several other times discussing this issue that cannot be overstated he continues and that's that this corner crossing case, who knows, could wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court, was a certified and verified corner. So when these individuals used this ladder to jump corners and stay on public land while crossing over two corners of private land, they were doing this on a surveyed and verified corner. This individual, this surveyor goes on to say when most of the section corners were set in the 1800s it was marked by either a nearby rock which was then carved and engraved in a specific way

a pile of flat rocks they found and stacked one on another, or they would cut off a branch from a nearby tree and bury that sticking out of the ground and dig four holes around it, one due north, east, south, and west. Many of these original section corners have been replaced with more modern monuments, most often a three-inch aluminum cap on either a pipe or a piece of rebar pounded in the ground. You see these quite often. But others have not. Knowing this, unless you know exactly what you are looking for, and more importantly, where you are looking for it,

you are not going to find the section corner. corner um in his career he's dealt with the buried branches sticking out of the ground and has noted they last about a year or two you think also on cal's comment of the surveyor's thinking when setting a corner a surveyor saying to himself there's no way anyone is going to use this. He says that does happen. And I found record of at least one instance where the surveyor quite literally said about here. Surveying sections is supposed to be a perfect grid with lines running true north, south, and east, west, with intersections every 5,280 feet, but that is never, ever the case. Finally, on the comment, he says, I can't remember who said it, of OnX not being 100%

accurate to take you to the section corner. I personally have witnessed OnX being 40 feet off their section corners. But what he goes on to clarify, now I'm going to paraphrase him. This isn't even an on X issue. Your phone isn't that accurate. Your smartphone isn't really accurate much better than a 16-foot radius. So for you to be jumping corners based off of your phone or to be trusting fences, there's how accurate is the information and how accurate is the phone.

Sincerely, Lance Revereyor another guy reached out I was saying I could always look at a fella hold on I got a quick little retort to him not so much that but I just wanted someone to clarify this when I read that email I got to thinking well

if the landowners there have set fences aren't they in some way saying this is where I believe this corner is? And sort of setting a precedent of where this corner is and has been? They're not? No, I saw a fence the other day that was wildly off because for him to make it on his borderline, like in this case, it was to the advantage. It was to the, the advantage of, of, to the advantage of, was it? No, no, no. Sorry.

We were where BLM came up against the ranch. Yeah. And it was a bunch of, it was a bunch of badlands and he owned a bunch of the badlands but just ran it sure along the bench yeah and there was corners in there and it was like and you went up to a thing and and it was just a matter of convenience where you run fences so i don't think that i just think that like these things weren't on anyone's mind, you know? No, 100% not. But I'm just trying to figure out like in, because everybody, because they're saying, yeah, don't try to cross this corner unless you have.

Know where it's at. Go and have it surveyed. Right. But I'm just saying, if it was, let's say it wasn't Badlands and you're in a prairie and someone has set these set this corner to the best of their knowledge. Can we all just agree that it's to the best of our knowledge? Are you going to cross the corner where the corner is? In looking at what these fellas are going through in Wyoming, I would not make any assumptions about anything. Like if whether that placement of the fence is in actuality the right corner or not, the point is that that landowner, whether it's to the benefit of the public or to the benefit of himself, put something there that is like the physical signifier to anyone who might be thinking to cross that that's right so it's like the intention behind it right you're not i understand but if you're gonna go into a

court in this case going to wyoming and there's a guy saying that he's taking you to civil court over seven million dollars um i'd like to think that i was on a surveyed corner and not have an added wrinkle beat buddy that, that fence. And you can. Isn't even on my corner. You can just build. But isn't that up to the landowner to properly Yeah, I mean, I think, well, there's two landowners.

I mean. The fence thing is like completely arbitrary. Like you could, you could just build, you know, if you owned a ranch, you have every right to build a, you know, a section of fence wherever you want on it. Right. And this corner wasn't, this corner's not even

a fence that we're talking about. Yeah. And so it's not like it's, you can't just assume that because a fence exists, that's where the private landowner believes the boundary is. Like that's a pretty big leap of. Maybe it's his neighbor's fence. Yeah.

Might not even be his fence. Or. Might be the government's fence. Or the previous owner built the fence and the previous owner didn't know. Well, it'll be interesting to see who they sort of eventually, they're going to have to say, hey, it's someone's responsibility to get these things surveyed.

I can see all kinds of implications. One of the implications I can see down the road is if this goes and it gets just settled in some outright way. I'm not doing any corner crossing because it feels too up in the air. Until it's further settled. No, I'm saying if it ever got settled, if it was just settled and the courts decided and it was litigated and the law of the land was laid out that corner crossing is legal, I would think that I would be raising money to survey strategic corners like to to find to to codify in very strategic locations those places but i just keep as people are getting in you know pushing these boundaries i just think it's i keep reminding people that where this happened was a surveyed corner and that you can't go by,

you know, to really actually be like placing your feet is very precise. Have you heard from like any of our game warden buddies here in this, in Montana, if the, if corner crossing or trespassing is on the rise in like this hunting season? I haven't heard of anybody prosecuting it this year and there's no way it didn't happen this year, but I haven't heard of it. That'd be good. That'd be a good question. I want to move on though. You fine Randall?

Yeah. No, there wasn't, there was a case up in, uh, up by Townsend. A corner crossing case. Yeah. There's, and there's some other, you know, like some claims were made that the individual had trespassed. It's kind of, I think it was still, the details were fuzzy for a little bit while the, while the legal system sorted things out.

I think the charges were dropped, but that was like in the, in the headlines, it was sort of a corner crossing related dispute, but I don't really know enough about it to get into the details no i know in this state there's an organization gearing up to fight corner crossing and they're uh they're getting ready to spend spend money on a public campaign to turn people off to the idea that you'd be able to corner across.

I have posited. Is that the right use of that word? Yeah. But I can look at a felon and tell if he snores. Now, with 90% accuracy. Do you think Will snores? Let's try it. Let's try it right here with Will. I'm not going to do that.

Well, I found out recently That I was at an ear nose and throat doctor And they measure your neck And they're measuring my neck Like you're at a tailor And I said what are you measuring my neck for And they're like it has to do with sleep apnea issues I'm like what do you mean

They said a 16 inch neck A 16 inch neck is more likely to have sleep apnea Wait is that like on the smaller end Or the larger end Like 16 plus 16 inch neck sleep apnea wait is that like on the smaller end or the larger end like i gather it's larger 16 inch neck like around or like 16 circumference oh you know your waist measurement from your pants right okay yeah so um that's how yeah they just put a they put a tape around your neck and i was like why the hell are you doing that Will's butting his shirt up

And they were saying That that's a They're looking at how likely are you to have sleep apnea And they said They take notice At a 16 inch neck Which I thought was really surprising But it ends there or it goes 16 and up

16 and up Greater than 16 Is like some marker for them to be like, oh, let's ask a bunch of questions about sleep apnea. Average is 15, according to the internet. Now, this guy says, reaching out because Steve mentioned in an episode that he can now look at people and guess if they have sleep apnea or suffer from snoring. It's not all that far off. This is from a dentist, a DDS. While we definitely see a correlation with neck circumference and sleep

apnea snoring, one can also see snoring and sleep apnea in the shape of the jaw. Which I also didn't know that's what I was looking at. It's a theory. I think this is not necessarily true. Over the past 1,000 years,

we have seen that about 25% of the population has seen a gradual decrease in jaw size, both maxillary and mandibular. Mandibular? I think it's mandibular. He also didn't cite the source, but... According to archaeological evidence, 1,000 years...

Well, I know, it's getting a little science-y. I really got you, Phil. Well, it's just... It's mainly because Corinne has it in the notes that, like, please say this is just a theory. Well, listen, it's getting a little science-y because over the past 1,000 years, we have seen that about 25% of the population has,

it's like, um, who, who a thousand years ago, I guess skeletal remains. Okay. I'm going to take him at face value. He's a scientist.

He's a doctor. Well, DDS, you know, according to archeological evidence, he goes on 1,000 years years ago there was much more room for teeth including wisdom and there was not as much crowding in teeth as we see now the working theory is that because we have domesticated the majority of our food supply and have selectively bred for

hyper palatable and easily chewed foods the body no longer needs to build a large lower face to support chewing dense materials. If you're wondering what that is, that's that plain ass boring chicken breast that we get served all the time. I'm finding myself clenching right now to accentuate my jawline. You don't have to because you chew on elk so

much. I can't read like this though uh the smaller jaw and increase in overall size of the human oh so okay we've gotten bigger jaws have gotten smaller has created a mismatch that's interesting And has pushed the tongue into the back of the throat, thus creating a more collapsible upper airway. This produces snoring and sleep apnea. We treat the disease with either a CPAP or what I do, a mandibular repositioning device. Hope this helps. Which is a night guard. I wonder if that tongue going farther back into your airway there,

if that makes it harder or easier to, what's the term when you're diving and you gotta... Oh, those clicks. Clear. Yeah, frenzel. Frenzel.

This is an argument that if you want to stop snoring in this country, cut your jerky with the grain, not against the grain. You know, get in the gym and do whatever. Get some, you know, like those bands, a resistance band, and train your jaw. Yeah, or just put jerky in the gym. Or just eat the food that Will's producing.

I'm just hypothesizing that that may be why y'all talk so funny. Nailed it. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps way waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it,

be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com slash meet onxmaps.com slash meet welcome to the to the onx club y'all okay last bit of last bit of feedback and then we're gonna get on to it we're gonna give

our guests is is due um is at this point overdue a lot of the time. Here's my thoughts on why Steve is wrong about gluten allergy and conservatives. Now, I was recently, I have been saying for years, and I've been stating it as though it was a fact, that I felt that, well, no, I acted like I had read this somewhere.

You would never. You read it in your diary. I felt just by my exposure to the world that I felt that, that, that gluten allergies were, were decided like, like the left leaning people were, had a far greater likelihood of having gluten allergies.

So much so that I didn't bother to look it up. Well, Spencer looked it up. In fact, I was wrong. Conservatives are more likely to believe in ghosts. Also surprised me. And conservatives are far more likely to order their steak medium rare.

And they're no more likely to have a gluten intolerance. You're adding that up. Listen, the medium rare thing is overwhelming medium rare but you know all of like uh well in at least in south africa everyone likes their meat cooked probably because so probably because of food handling and you know i mean anywhere you go in the in the can you still say developing world what are you supposed to call it? I think so. Anywhere you go in the developing world, man, there's a lot of overcooked stuff.

Yeah, for a reason. Yeah, I mean, I don't know why. Where do liberals fall on the meat temperature scale? No, no, no. He just said the most common, so the most common ordered steak is medium rare, but it winds up being that conservatives like conservatives are 64 do you remember what it was 64 more likely to order a medium rare steak anyways this guy goes on to say i didn't know this

he says there's a conspiracy theory floating around or no no there is a conspiracy theorist level correlation. I gotta unpack that sentence. Yeah, Corinne's trying to throw in hyphens to make it make more sense. She's randomly throwing hyphens in there. There is a conspiracy theorist... No, you did the

hyphen in the right place. There is a conspiracy theorist level correlation between the consumption and exposure to glyphosate commonly marketed as Roundup. Is that fair, Will? Did I say that right? That glyphosate

is Roundup? It is Roundup, yes. And is Roundup the only widely available glyphosate? Or is that just a product name? They had the patent on that molecule for a long time. Okay. And I think there may be some knockoffs,

but yes, they own that market. So Roundup, you would say, is glyphosate. Yeah, which used to be Monsanto. It's now Bayer. Got it. Bayer. Hmm. There's a... Okay, I i'm gonna read that part again to my understanding the more exposure to roundup you have now this now we are way into areas where i

am not here to verify any of this i'm not saying it's just because i'm not saying it's from a legal exposure standpoint i'm just saying it's from like i don't know this this gentleman uh whalen of course this guy's name is whalen i love this guy to my understanding the more exposure to roundup you have the higher chance of developing a gluten allergy then he goes on to say if we are making far-fetched correlations to which i would say are we if we are making far-fetched correlations, to which I would say, are we? If we are making far-fetched correlations, then it is easy to assume those in rural areas, farmers, land managers, and general folks living around farms and ranches, are at a higher exposure rate of glyphosate due to farming practices and availability of the chemical.

I once walked into our local ag office to get some mean chemical that you needed a permit to buy the nice this is not me this is the gentleman that wrote in the nice lady asked me what account to put it under and after listing four different farmers we found one that had a permit after i paid i called my buddy whose account it was on to tell him what i did and his response was i got a barrel of it you should have come and gotten what you needed from me to wrap up the correlation if we believe if he says if we like bringing me into this if we believe that roundup causes gluten intolerance and by which he means if he believes roundup is widely available for rural folks most rural folks are conservatives then it's easy to see more conservatives would have a gluten allergy my source on my theory here we go finally

his mother-in-law of course no one person one subject my my source on my theory my mother-in-law, of course. Oh, one person. One subject. My source on my theory. My mother-in-law spent 20 years living in a bottom surrounded by crop farms. Now, this is the best detail of this whole letter. This is incredible. What a segue. They would need to tarp their garden when the surrounding farmers

were spraying crops because wind drift would kill the garden. He goes on to say she has a gluten allergy. What else could cause that? And she goes on to say that in terms of her political leanings she has three

flags a du flag old glory and a trump 2020 case closed that's he should just have sent that instead of sending it to us he should have sent that to the journal science yeah i think so or the usda maybe he could have gotten that uh he should sent that to a peer-reviewed. Again, somebody should cause attention to the fact that golf courses, municipalities, parks, a tremendous amount of Roundup is used in the non-ag sector. Incredible. There are labels for it. They're not ag labels.

So, yeah, I'm sure more of it's used in the fields but a lot of it's used in municipal situations since we're on that subject let's talk about um i want to ask you some questions about herbicides uh just on the thing around i had once had to tell me a guy tell me and you might be able to tell me how true this is, that when Roundup became available, its promise was that it was less toxic than coffee. Absolutely. And someone told me that people would take a sip. I've seen the Monsanto rep take a sip.

Yes. What? Okay, so that's true. In the early 70s, yes. I heard that was true, and that was the thing. It was like, if it was dangerous, then would I do this? Oh, no. Well, but nobody really worried about it being dangerous in that era, but they would do it

just to show how safe and benign it was. Yeah, I remember it. You probably used it in your career quite a bit, huh? Oh, yes, a lot. And not without gloves or masks or goggles or any of the covering. It was just, matter of fact, I was in the custom spraying business for a period of time when I was uber industrial, spraying crops. And I had people hired that sprayed Roundup and other herbicides, insecticides, pesticide.

You know what side means, right? Infanticide, fratricide. Homicide. Kill. Kill, Kill. Yeah. You know where we ought to start besides Roundup? I think we should start with the history of you guys, your farm. That'd probably be a smarter place to start. Because you made a very deliberate, you brought your family farm through a very deliberate transition.

Can you lay out the trajectory of your family farm over time? Sure. And how it naturally evolved and then how it evolved somewhat forcefully under your tenure. So my great-grandfather came to that farm in early county Georgia in 1866 and farmed it, followed by his son, my grandfather, who farmed it. And they would have farmed, you know, we don't know too much about their, the way they farmed, other than just anecdotal, what people did in those eras.

But it would have been multi-species with a lot of, certainly without dependence upon chemistry. My dad took over the farm. He was born in 1920. He took over the farm in 1945 after World War II. And that was when farming really changed. My dad was part of the leadership in our part of the country that industrialized, commoditized, centralized agriculture. It was very successful with it.

It went from a monoculture of a lot of different species of plants and animals to a monoculture today of only cattle, a polycultural monoculture. Your farm went poly to mono. Poly to mono. My great-grandfather and grandfather would have had a lot of species. So my dad ran the farm all his career. I was born in 1954, went to the University of Georgia in 1972, majoring in animal science. My dad industrialized the farm.

I came home and further industrialized the farm and ran it that way for 20 years. And it was financially comfortable. In the mid-'90s, for a number of reasons, I started to rethink things pretty quickly and did. And for the last 25 years,'ve been running it an amount of that without intentionally copying them but amount of it resembles what my great-grandfather grandfather did a hell of a lot more than it resembles what my dad and i did what was the what was the the

trigger like what were the things you were seeing on your family property that, that prompted you to, to rethink your approach to agriculture? And then also you might as well define, define your approach to agriculture. I mean, we can say stuff like regenerative agriculture. And to be honest with you, I hear that all the time. It took me a long time to figure out like kind of what it meant. And you, I've even heard you, I was reviewing some of the talks you've given and i've heard you say that you anticipate that term being hijacked yeah yeah um so that it'll become like other catch other agricultural catchphrases that that have a sort

of that their meaning becomes diminished yeah as it gets appropriated. Yeah. Today we call it regenerative. That has not been co-opted much yet. And to me that means emulation of nature. Okay. The natural cycles. The industrial agriculture that I used to use running a monoculture of only cattle breaks those cycles. I ran the farm as a monocultural cattle industry for 20-something years and was financially comfortable.

I got dissatisfied with it when I came to see the damage I was doing. The admission is that while I was a very industrial cattleman, I always opted on the high side. If the label rate said 2 cc's per 100, I probably gave them 3 cc's per 100 pounds of body weight. If it said a pint to the acre i probably put a quart to the acre and i guess you mean like if one's good two's better one's good two's better and three's really good and it worked for me but because i was so heavy-handed, I came to see the unintended consequences.

And it kind of strangely, it manifested itself on the animal welfare side. In 1995, I was loading a truckload of cattle to ship to the west for feeding. We did that a lot. These would have been 500-pound calves, so there would have been about 100 of them on the truck. So they were going to be on that truck going to Nebraska for 30 hours. I was going to guess Nebraska. That's where these were going,

although that's not the only state we fed in. That's where these were going. That that's not the only state we fed in. That's where these were going. That was about as far as we went. It took 30 hours to get to Nebraska. You're basically moving them to the corn. Exactly. Yeah. It's cheaper to move the cows to the corn than the corn to the cows.

Yeah. Oh. So they would have been on there for 30 hours with the ones on top urinating and defecating on the ones on the bottom without food or water or rest. And I had done it dozens of times. But all of a sudden that morning, it just didn't feel good. So it made me start thinking about all the things I was doing that were financially working for me but needed rethinking.

Mm-hmm. doing that were financially working for me but needed rethinking. And the animal welfare, which is, that was an animal welfare issue, quickly led me to the environmental side. I mean, it was just like, if this is wrong, this is wrong. So I fairly abruptly ceased using chemical fertilizers, pesticides on my farm, dewormers, antibiotics, ionophores on the cows. I only had cattle at the time. And I tried to make a living like that, and it was not nearly as financially rewarding,

but it felt a lot better. And it started me on this journey that I've been on for 25 years and has really been good for us in many ways. We probably have not made as much money, probably left some money on the table that we could have made if we'd operated more industrially and within the system. But the land is way better off. The livestock is way better off.

I think we've got a more, it may not be a more profitable business, but I think it's more resilient. And two of my three daughters and their spouses came back, and I'm pretty sure they would not had I continued to farm industrially. So it's been way more good than bad. They might not have been drawn to it. No, they would not have been. I never wanted to do anything but run that farm.

But my daughters were raised the way people raise children in the 80s and 90s. And, you know, it was about ballet and gymnastics and karate and soccer and softball. And they would not have come back to the farm. Let me give you a question about raising cattle um i've picked up a handful bit i know a little bit primarily i know stuff about raising cattle hunting on people's farms and ranches and you always go like so what's that that you know i have zero background in ag i've just picked stuff up through exposure but when you talk about the system,

you're now capturing the entire system. Meaning, you've got cows that'll be bred and born on your farm, and you'll sell the burger at your store. And we have a

slaughter plant on the floor as well. Yeah, you're running the whole damn deal. Vertically agreed. Let's go back to when you were a boy. Tell me what portion of that process you were capturing as a boy, just so people can see a little bit of this. What portion of a cow's life were you in charge of as a boy, just so people can see a little bit of this. What portion of a cow's life were you in charge of as a boy? And then what portion are you guys doing now at White Oak Pastures?

My dad and later me had mama cows only. That's the only crop we produced was cattle. We had mama cows. We bred them initially, naturally, later on through artificial insemination. We gave birth to the calves and we weaned them at about six months of age and shipped them

to the feedlot area like we just discussed. And then now talk about the transformation you've had, just in terms of cattle. Just in terms of cattle. We've gone from being a little snippet in the huge beef production system to being a tiny, tiny little beef production system.

We own the mama cows. We have the calves. We finish the calves on grass only. Grass, hay, no corn. And then we slaughter them, and then we sell them. We sell them some wholesale to grocers, some through our little store. We've got a little restaurant. Oh, so you're selling cooked product, too.

It's small. Well, it's three meals a day, seven days a week, but it don't feed that many people. But it's possible for a person to go and eat a burger. It's probable. Probable. Probable. To eat a burger that was produced right there.

Yeah, we've got 170 employees, and it's 12 miles to the nearest place to eat. And it's a fast food place. So I put in the food service to feed my employees, but we've expanded it. It's not big, but we do cook 21 meals a week, and it's good. The economics change completely, oh yeah yeah i went back and looked not i never from the time i graduated the university of george in 1976 until i started changing the way we raised cattle in 1995 i never lost money money. I paid taxes every year. Now, we didn't make a hell of a lot of money, but we lived comfortably, and we were consistently

profitable. I had a number of years of losses when I was transitioning over, and I was very fortunate. I had inherited a nice, paid-for farm and made a little money of my own so we were able to to survive it but we had to survive it and then what do you guys do uh talk about how you compost um i understand this to be true from your book do you guys instead of sending shit off to a rendering plant you guys are you guys are handling that too yeah we are yeah so we generate how does that even how does that work i mean i picture dragging it out letting it rot you wouldn't want to do that yeah but i mean i don't

picture even i can't i don't picture what it even like composting a carcass it's very different so well of course well there are some whole carcasses, because when we have death loss, we compost them too. But most of it is packing plant waste. That's what USDA calls it. That would be eviscerate hooves, feathers, gut fill, whatever's not marketable. Skulls, central nervous system tissue, which we can't harvest. It's got brain spinal cord.

But we generate about nine tons a day, five days a week. And we compost it. Nine tons a day? Yeah, it sounds like a lot. So you pick up a cow's stomach. And it's a lot. Oh, yeah. So you pick up a cow's stomach. Well, yeah. And it's a lot of moisture. I mean, as far as dry material, it's probably 80% moisture. I see.

You got to deal with it. So we do compost. Composting is taking a nitrogenous material, animal remains, and a carbaceous material. In our case, it would be peanut shells or wood chips or whatever people give us. It's not homeowners, but the asplundt or the peanut shell implants. And there are rules.

Oh, and you say, you mean the tree, the big power line tree company? Yeah. Asplen? I know that outfit. Yeah. They dump those wood chips. We make it available, not for anybody, but for people that we trust to dump

carbaceous material there. Can I tell you a quick little side tidbit about Asplen? So, you know, they do those big power line gas line projects um i used to sell firewood and when they would go through a big landowner um i'd go in there and broker a deal to get all that and i'd sell all that that's the same thing i do they just leave it laying, man. Like mostly cut up. And I would go in there and bucket it into 16-inch lengths and split it and sell it. And people would be glad I did it.

Well, I'm glad I found them too. There are ratios of nitrogenous material and carbaceous material that you mix. There are rules you go by. We have a thermometer with a five-foot handle, probe on it. We stick in there. Are you grinding up the cow? Not anymore. I used to.

I have a grinder, but we struggle to keep it going. Except for the bones, it comes apart. The bones become very porous. I should tell you this. It takes six or seven weeks to compost that animal material. But it has been recommended to us that we let it sit for a year. If you let it sit a year, the compost becomes less bacterial and more fungal,

and it's better for the land. So we let it sit a year, and not only does it become more fungal and it's better fertilizer, but those bones become porous. You got to give this to me like you're gone out of town and you're explaining to me on the phone what I need to do. Okay. So my guys put the carbaceous material, peanut shells or wood chips into long windrows.

Okay. On the surface, not subsurface. No, no, no, no. On the surface. Okay. Yeah. And by, no, no, no, on the surface. Okay. Yeah. And by the way, we move this operation around the farm. You don't want it to sit in one place too long.

I fear it might be too much at some point. So we move it around every year or so. But the animal material goes onto a little dump truck. Right out of the plant. Right out of the plant? Right out of the plant. Okay. Every day, maybe twice a day, at least once a day. And they'll take it up to the composting area,

wherever that happens to be right then. And they'll take a big Caterpillar front-end loader and build kind of a bed of the, uh, carbaceous material to back the truck up and dump it in. So it's dumped on 24 inches of carbaceous material. Peanut shells, wood chips. Got it. They dump it.

Then they cover it up with more of the same. Again, 18, 24 inches. Okay. And here's a little fun fact. If we do a good job covering it up, you never smell it and you never see buzzards or vultures. That was my next question. My next question was going to be about buzzards. I bet you do.

I bet you do. All right, so let me tell you. Sometimes something happens, you know, the load is torn up or whatever, and we can't get it covered up as quickly as we want to. When that happens, you can see those vultures, be it red-headed or black-headed, just stacking up there. So it's important we keep it covered, which we do. And then you let it sit a year?

Well, you've got to mechanically stir it and take temperatures and record the temperatures. But as long as we do that, in six or eight weeks, it will be composted. And then we let it sit a year. We pile it up and let it sit for a year and then we let it sit a year we pile it up let it sit for a year then we spread it on our pastures i've got a spreader truck with a 48 inch bed chain so big bones can come out the back of it we put two tons to the acre and it is seriously where

it's magic it's mad it's good you're feeding good. You're feeding the microbe. That compost is feeding the microbes in the soil. This is important. It's feeding the plant. It feeds the animal. It's turned into feces or put back through the plant. So it's like magic. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnXx club y'all when something has gone through the process of being composted in

those first six weeks exactly what happens it goes from what to what it goes from guts and chips to compost, which is a stable, not hot anymore, stable, moisture-absorbing plant food that contains nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium. In this case, a lot of phosphorus and calcium because of the bones. It's what is supposed to happen. You know, the buffalo dies and rots, and it grows grass. What are the temperatures you're getting in those piles as it's working? Yeah, 150 degrees. And if it's not hot enough, they stir it and oxygenate

it and take the front end loader. They make some really great expensive machines that do that. I'd love to have one. I ain't got one. Does that process costing you money or saving you money? Yeah. Yes.

Which pile is bigger? No, it well, it's the right thing to do for a lot of reasons sure no i love it i mean i love it like just as a non-farmer i love the sounds of it i'm just curious like is it like uh is it a cost sink or is it a great way to fertilize. It's a great way to fertilize. It costs money. We've got some equipment and a couple of guys dedicated to it, and that has a cost. But the plant fertility, land fertility that I get out of it, you can't even, you can't, you couldn't afford to buy it. Got it. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. It's great.

We can talk about this later, but the organic matter in my soil on my farm has gone from a half a percent to over 5%. 10x more carbon in the soil. No shit. No shit. I think, no shit. I think, or some shit, but mostly pine bush. When do you think that, okay, let's say we knew that, that if you went back to, if you went back to 1923, okay, so we go back a century. Yeah.

You think that it might've been around five? I don't know. I mean, that's a great question. I've asked some people, but I don't know anybody that was doing much carbon sampling in 1923. I guess you wouldn't even have thought to look, right? Somebody somewhere probably knows, but the practices that my dad and I did, the tillage and use of nitrogen fertilizer, maybe pesticides, I don't know if that affects it much, but certainly tillage and use of nitrogen fertilizer burns up carbon in the soil. Just makes it go away.

So when you've got soil that's a half a percent organic model, which is what mine had gotten to, it's a dead mineral medium. So let me tell you this. One percent organic model, I'm told, will absorb a one-inch rain event. So on an acre of land, a one-inch rain event is 27,000 gallons of water. So my farm now will absorb, I believe, five times 27, 5% organic matter times 27,000 gallons. That's a lot of water.

And we get a lot of water. I'm about 80 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. We get 52 inches a year, and a lot of it's in big rain events. It's not unusual to have a 5-inch rain, but I got 5% organic model. That don't mean it all soaks in because it comes too fast. If it came slowly enough, we'd absorb it all.

And the benefits of that compared to soil that's minerally, that pretty much what just like sifts through water and... No, the water just percolates. I'm in the Gulf Coast, the Gulf Coastal region, which is an ancient seabed. So the soil is pretty sandy compared to what you've got here. And just, it won't hold the water. And it doesn't have the minerals. We put a lot of minerals out there because of all that, the bones and whatnot. It's one of the best things I ever stumbled onto. When I first built the slaughter plant, getting rid of a viscerate, animal waste was a problem.

We had to pay somebody to come get it. And I didn't have a big enough plant for them to come every day. That meant I was going to have to refrigerate it. I just had a lot of problems. You were refrigerating that stuff? No, no, I never did. I was going to have to. Got it.

The people do refrigerate it because it takes a lot of room and it's nasty. It's a lot of, it's not, the actual blood is not in it. We drain the blood separately, which we also use as fertilizer, but it's different. But there's a lot of manure, a lot of fresh flesh, and there's just still blood in the cars. Walk me through moving just from beef production into producing poultry and other red meats. Was that because you thought it would be fun, or did you need to do that to try to hit the same finances? Like you could, you couldn't make it work with B.

B. So, but it wasn't just financial. I mean, it was, it was certainly financial. Everything I do is financial because I got to make it work. But when I changed from the industrial production model that I was deeply entrenched in to this model I'm in now. I didn't realize I was going to have to add other species, but I did. I started having weeds that I, previously I sprayed it with Grazon PNT, which is another herbicide that we didn't talk about.

You know, I had insects, I sprayed it. You know, I used all these sides. To just get what you wanted out of the land and nothing else. That's right. That's right. So what we probably will talk about eventually here is monocultural production. Monocultural production is bad. It's what modern food production is based on.

But nature abhors a monoculture. I don't believe, you've been all over the world, I don't believe you can name an ecosystem in the world that's a monoculture. I don't think it exists in nature. Nature wants a smorgasbord of animals and plants and microbes living in symbiotic relationships with each other. That's what we try to do, but I didn't know that back then. So I was going to continue my monoculture of cattle.

I was just going to give up those technical tools that I keep naming. And I found out that I couldn't do it. The weeds came and smothered my grass. First of all, the grass that I planted was Tifton 85 Bermuda grass, which is a super hybrid Bermuda grass bred by the University of Georgia that requires incredible amounts of nitrogen to live. Now, it grows like crazy, but it just takes a lot of nitrogen. And when I quit putting chemical nitrogen out there,

I started losing that stand. You know that term? Oh, yeah, yeah. And then all kind of crap came. And instead of using Grazon P&D to kill the crap, I didn't have that anymore. So we added sheep and goats, which are ruminants like cow. Because you needed something to eat all that junk. That's right.

Correct. And then later I added poultry. And it was poultry stuff. Now, we're struggling added poultry. And poultry's tough. Now, we're struggling with poultry. I'm not sure how that's going to work out. What's tough about poultry? Being able to charge enough to make it worthwhile? Yeah, that.

So my beef probably cost about 30% more than industrial beef. We could argue about it, but that's close. My poultry probably cost 300% more than industrial poultry. Wow. Because when we, the smaller the species, the more handily it lent itself to industrialization. So when we industrialized cattle, which my dad was part of that movement,

put them in big 100,000 head feedlots. He never had 100,000 head, but they do. He had 500 head feedlots. Put them in those feedlots and take cost out of production. With poultry, they're so small, they lent themselves to that industrialization. You can put 30,000 of them in a chicken house, and one guy can probably handle X chicken houses because it's highly mechanized. So we just took so much cost.

I was in Boulder, Colorado at the Boulderama Hotel years ago. Boulderama? Isn't that how you say it? I don't know. Something like that. It's a big cowboy hotel there. Kind of a landmark. And I ate supper there.

And I had just built my poultry business and spent a million point something, one point something million dollars on the processing plant. And it wasn't working financially. And I was worried about it. And I was waiting on them to bring me my supper. Y'all eat dinner, we eat supper.

No, I grew up eating supper. Listen, man, I had to make a decision when I started college. I had to train myself to stop saying supper because I noticed that no one said that. We have a different – I had to be like – We had the same college experience. We had different decisions. I went to the University of Georgia with a bunch of my buddies,

and it just seemed like as soon as we got there, they said, hey, you guys want dinner? What happened to y'all won't supper? So I dug in a little deeper. No, yeah, it's so funny. I don't know, man. I grew up in a weird little supper corner of the. Johnny, did you guys say dinner or supper?

We did not say dinner. We said vacarines. Oh. Yeah. But I mean, all over the Midwest, there's supper clubs that's what i was thinking so it can't be that we don't know we don't at noon every day and we so we definitely didn't do that we had breakfast lunch and then you have supper what's what's supper time breakfast dinner supper and we still do so what was the first have you ever had lunch

i didn't like it. No, but I'm honest. He eats two dinners a day. At what point in your life did you realize that there's this other thing called lunch, which is the same thing as dinner for you? I mean, I could read and write. I knew what he was talking about. I talked real slow, I think pretty slow, but I put that dental thing together.

So, anyway, I lost my train of thought. You had just spent one point something, a million, at a poultry place, and you had ordered up some poultry in a restaurant. Or no, you had ordered your dinner. You're waiting on your supper. I was waiting on my supper. In the Boulder Island. They had menus framed from like 1923 or something. I got a picture somewhere in my phone, and it said beef plate, beef dinner probably, 99 cent.

Pork dinner, 99 cent. Pork dinner, 99 cent. Chicken dinner, $1.30. Oh. So, you know. At some point in time. Before we industrialized, we took all the costs out. But now. Now that would say $39.

Yeah. $37. $19. Yeah. Right. Something like that. say $39 yeah $37 $19 yeah right so we anyway that's uh we we struggle with poetry the the death so that was like when you saw that thing though it hit you something about the the odd of wackiness of where we've gotten with cheap poultry shit I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I hadn't built it. I wish I hadn't built that plant.

And, you know, we're fixing to. We're cutting back on our poultry because we have lost so much money. I still want to do it, but I'm not sure how it's going to look. So you haven't turned it around? No. And you can't find a market that will pay enough to keep it going? Not on enough birds. I'll tell you something else.

I don't think I'm a very good poultry farmer. I'm a really good beef guy. When I moved from beef to sheep, that was the first specie I bought. I said, you know, they just like little cows. I can do that. They're not like little cows. It's hard. But we got reasonably good and hired some people to help us.

Then I got ready to put goats out there because, you know, goats and sheep are both small ruminants, but sheep eat forbs, goats eat scrub for the most part. You need both of them. So I got goats. I said, you know, I've learned how to run sheep. I can run goats. So then we got birds, and I didn't know how to do that, and hogs,

I didn't know how to do that. And Is, I didn't know how to do that. And I'm still not, I don't think I'm real good at it. Is the hogs making money? Yeah, yeah, hogs are making money. Is goats making money? Yeah, yeah, yes. Cheap. You know, the reason I'm, the answer's yes,

but the reason I'm not saying hell yeah is we, you know, in a farm like ours where everything is integrated and working together, it's really hard to identify a single line. So let's talk about the difference between linear and cyclical. Okay. Can we do that? Yeah, please. Most businesses are very linear. You know, just next, next, next. A farm is meant to be cyclical.

It's close to nature. You know, for the inputs, it goes around and around. The waste stream coming off a cyclical business like a farm. It's a very small area. But the complexity of it is really hard to know. So I told you I'm losing a lot of money on poultry, and I am. I don't believe it talking to my accountant. But he's not accounting for the additional fertility that bird manure puts out.

All the feathers and carcasses, that's an extra income stream that's not showing up on my financials. So it gets very difficult. There are reasons there are a lot of cyclical farms that are on the stock exchange. It doesn't manifest itself in monthly reports or quarterly reports or annual reports. It manifests itself generationally. Help me understand that. Say that again

so most linear businesses okay uh you know you can pull a monthly report or quarterly report an annual report and get a pretty good indicator of how your business is doing financially economically i understand what you're saying in a farm farm, I may show I'm losing money, but if I'm moving it from a half percent organic model to five percent organic model, it's not on there. Yeah, no, I understand. If my herd went from being where you probably could report the numbers, I don't, which is good,

but the productivity of your herd doesn't show up on there. I understand. All that stuff's not getting captured. You're rehabilitating the landscape, future generations. That's not showing up in your quarterly report. And it manifests itself as wealth generationally. We've got a little management team. I used to run that farm. Absolutely.

Autonomous, just me. And as it grew, we brought other people in management, and we have a meeting once a week, Thursday afternoon in my office, and we talk about things we want to do. And it never pays off in the month or quarter or year. It's all very long-term, very generational. And I love that, but it's very problematic. Since you're selling all the stuff that you produce, and you know how many acres you got,

you kind of have a rare, and I know this goes against a little bit of what you were just saying, that you don't do a quarterly report, but you probably wind up with a kind of rare glimpse for an ag producer into this acreage spins off

this many dollars worth of food. Because it doesn't get lost in some broader equation. Meaning if you grow corn, and you're selling corn for ethanol, and you're selling corn for feed, you would never answer the question like, oh no, my corn helped produce X gallons of ethanol gasoline and my corn helped produce X pounds of beef down the road. But at the end of the year, you know. Like, you know how many dollars worth, how many units, however the hell you want to measure it.

You know what came off that place yeah we do and we know that we got that we got i mean that's got to be an interesting number does that number does that ratio as you become better and learn this has that like dollars of off put per acre of land have you gotten better at it yes yes a lot better and i can i mean i don't even need to look at those financials i can tell that riding around in my jeep i mean it looks better i mean i can i mean it looks better years ago i was with my friend kevin murphy down in kentucky and we were driving around hunting cottontail rabbits.

He was telling me it was going to be a good day of hunting because we were going to an Amish farm. He said, that's where the game is at. The game is on the Amish farm. He pointed to a number of farming practices and this is going to sound like I don't mean, it's going to sound like I'm

generalizing. He had a couple, you just got there, it looked different. He's like, the practices are different. The equipment used is different. The philosophy is different. They're hell on predators. They have dirty fence rows. It's just different.

And you go there and all the time running around, man, the only quail we saw was on that Armistead farm. And he'd point around and be like that, that, that but you just knew when you got there. You're like wow this is a different looking farm. Absolutely.

You'll have the vocabulary for it. Well, there are one of the most beneficial creatures on my farm is a dung beetle. It's a beetle that is flighted beetle that is drawn to fresh manure, particularly cow manure. And when the dung beetle gets there it somehow gathers the most nutrient

dense part of the feces and that fresh always when it's fresh if it's been there a while they don't go to it and it digs a vertical 18 inch shaft into the ground about as big as that pencil

and the dirt comes up in the top of the menu and it packs it lays its eggs in the bottom and packs that tunnel with the most nutrient-rich part of that manure huh i know the animal but i didn't know they did that oh man it's wonderful i mean you can pay someone to do that. Well, guess what? We saw dung beetles when I was a kid. I didn't see them anymore. Because if you give cattle wormer to kill the worms in the system, it's toxic to the dung beetle when they lay the eggs and the feces.

No kidding. Really? So when I saw dung beetles, I know right where I was. I was driving along. I saw that dirt at the top of that fresh cow manure, and I slammed on brakes and backed up, and it was dung beetles. I got, yeah, there he is. And now I got a lot of them, and it stratifies.

Hey, Will, stay close to your mic. It keeps the fertility. Stay close to your microphone because Phil's going to get mad at you. Sorry about that. It keeps the nutrients from stratifying. You're just being on the top where the manure goes. The water can go down in those holes. And the horn flies and face flies, which are horrible blood-sucking insects for cattle, raised in that fresh cattle manure.

That's where they lay their eggs, too. When those dung beetles aerate it, you don't get the horn flies and face flies production. So it's like a gift from God in terms of insect control, fertility, land management. We killed them and spent money to buy cattle worm to kill them. And the list goes on and on and on. dozens of technology products that I spent money for that did more harm than good. You know, that's the way, I really think that's the way that works in agriculture. I'm not speaking about other areas. I had the first drone of anybody I know.

We're on about either third or fourth one. I love, I'm not opposed to technology. That's a good cell phone I threw down there because it kept beeping. I love, I mean, I love technology,

but technology in a complex system does not work well. In a complicated system, it works great. So we have to very judiciously decide. When you moved away from D-worm, did you move away from, you don't do any kind of hormones on your? We don't.

And that was the implant hormone, right? Yeah, mostly. There are a number of them, but the most common one goes in the skin behind the ear, and it slowly releases over about a hundred days. I haven't used it for a long time. I don't know what you got now. Dude, I got more and more friends doing that, man. You don't do that, do you?

Would you do it? I did do it for years. No, you in you. They do it in their butt. Oh, no, man. You guys know about this? No. A lot of guys, man. I can guess who you've been hanging out with.

Hormones for muscle growth? Listen, I'll tell you who later. He's really on the fence about it because he's got friends. I wonder what his testicles look like. I don't know. I do. He's got friends.

He's got friends. There's a lot of guys that are getting a little capsule. You cut the skin on your butt and you put this little capsule in there. And then you're, and then you're, and then you're like, you know, you're, you're whatever. You're more of a Superman. This, this, this, I hope this doesn't take too long. I'll try to make this short. But you wouldn't do that.

I wouldn't. Hell, I wouldn't. No. But I'll tell you this. When I was at the University of Georgia in the 70s, steroids were just a rumor. And I heard about them, and I told my guy that I thought Mike could get me some steroids, get me some of that. For you.

Yeah. And he didn't, but I happened to have reproductive physiology that quarter. It was a quarter system back then. And one of the things

we did is we had a hundred male chicks, little yellow chicks. You have to have them sex. Somebody got to, they know what they're doing.

These were males. And we divided them up into ten little pens. It was not good on them or welfare. And every day for that quarter, somebody had to inject all 100. You signed up. I'll take these days, and you take those days. And we didn't know what we were giving them.

All of them got the same dosage of whatever was on that bottle on top of their pen. And at the end of the quarter, we killed them and dissected them and weighed their testicles. And I was really starting to want some steroids because those on the end, they had the comb had dropped off there. Oh, yeah. And when you opened the pen, they'd come at you. On the other end of my mouth. Like souped up chickens.

Yeah, they would just steal a little yellow up. They'd run from you. Oh, hell yeah, that's that steroid. I'm going to get me some of that stuff. I can't wait. So the last, I hadn't got it yet. Last day, we killed them and dissected them. And those little birds that run from you on that end,

it was different doses all the way up from zero to whatever. The testicle was that big. Those down there that had the comb dripping down,'t find a little gobble fat that i guess must have been it so i told my guy never mind cancel that order well i don't want to get into this too long but there's a couple details i got to add in here about this is the guys i know are post-reproductive age, I caught wind of this, and I told my wife, I'm like, listen,

if these people that I know do this, and they can start smoking me up a hill, I'm going to have a hard time not doing it. Don't do it. Really? Yeah, I don't want to get smoked. You would? I don't want to get smoked up going up a hill.

Is this human growth hormone? Is this steroids? I don't know. I think it's probably testosterone. I could start naming people, but I don't want to name them. But if it turns out that they went from me being able to smoke them up a hill to them smoking me up a hill, it's going to be very hard for me to stomach this.

Hit the gym a bit more. It's such a little bitch way to go, though. Just hit the gym a little bit more, man. One day you're going to be 70 years old. Do some yoga. Damn, how quick you get up that hill. And you're going to wish all your stuff would stay the way it used to be. Hey, folks.

Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there. OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app

is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all.

There's a conversation I often have with my kids. My kids will laugh about stuff like, my dad used to love to tell the story that when he was in the military and you would get your C rations, there'd be three cigarettes in there. And he talked about that you'd be on a forced march and they would call a cigarette break. And we laugh now like, oh, how stupid. And I'm always telling my kids, I'm like, you right now, us right now, we are doing things right now. Maybe some things that we even think are good that your kids will sit and laugh about how in the world could we have been so stupid? Absolutely. What are some of the things that you look at in our agricultural practices?

What are some of the things that you look at in the 100 years? I'd be like, can you believe those idiots not only did that. I used to artificially inseminate my cattle. I would buy semen, pay for it, and put it in the cow when she was in estrus or heat. And the semen I was buying were from these big, monster, non-natural bulls. You know, their claim to fame is they had a a ribeye that big. And it was like that was the only

thing that mattered. You know, and today, you know, I, I, I close, not only do I not

buy semen anymore, I close the herd. It's a, I don't bring animals in now. I save my own bulls and I've been doing it for 10 years. The herd is so much better. animals in now. I save my own bulls and I've been doing it for 10 years.

The herd is so much better. You know, we put up, you know, you may have, I get these numbers confused, but a friend of mine had a herd of a hundred and something, 110 or something cows that he artificially inseminated with different bulls.

And he was selling purebred bull calves, so he had to know who the daddy was. I don't know what he did. So he'd take hair from the tail head and send it off, and they genetically sexed it. Tell me who the bull was. And he had done that with some natural breeding, put 10 bulls in with 120 cows. And one bull had like 56 calves.

One had 12, and then some four, and ones and twos, and zeros. Well, now, in my herd, I want the bull that got 56 calves. I don't care if his real body is this big or this big. I want, in my herd, I want the bull to got 56 calves. I don't care if his real body is this big or this big. I want that libido, that bull felt good. He was eating well. He was efficient. He had it going on. He was efficient.

Yeah, he was on the mountain or on the prairie or whatever at a time. Like he would have been the standard bear. He would have been the standard bear. Siring the buffalo herd or whatever. So, you know, I'm telling that story in reference to you about the silly things we do. Uh-huh. And there are a bunch of others. But, you know, just, that was

the wrong thing. I was spending money to not improve my herd. So that's not so much an issue of, that's not so much an issue of AI, it's an issue of the

source for the semen, right? No, well, I mean, AI, I've, I'm amazed. AI, I've learned, is artificial intelligence. It's always been artificial insemination to me. Oh, I still think

that's what it means. Good for you. You look younger than you must be. But the argument for it, though, the argument for artificial insemination, as I understand,

you can correct me on this, an argument for it is that you can synchronize, correct? You can synchronize so that your cows are calving within a very narrow window of time. That's two separate things. I'm confusing stuff? Okay. No, I mean, it's all right. I get it. But they do use hormone implants to synchronize the cow, but they could still breed them naturally. That's a separate shot.

Okay. So you can use a hormone to bring them into? Estrus or heat. Okay. So that you then, because they have the same, the gestation period is pretty fixed. 286 days. Okay. So you use a hormone to bring them in at the same time.

And then you can breed them naturally or breed them with artificial insemination to make sure that when it comes to calving time, you have a narrow window. Correct. A narrower window of calving time. It requires less of your attention to be around to make sure everybody births out. But you also don't do that, right? I don't. And it does.

Everything you say is true. But mostly people do that so they can put together a truckload of same-size, same-sex cattle. Sex is different. That doesn't control sex. And that doesn't mean anything to me because we slaughter cows 52 weeks a year. Uh-oh.

Yeah, that's interesting. You've kind of pulled yourself away from that need. Everything. We pull ourselves away from everything. You don't need to have everybody on such and such day always 600 pounds. Don't want it. Don't want it. I want to have everybody on such and such day always 600 pounds. Don't want it. Don't want it.

I want to have calves. So we have a herd where we are finishing our animals on grass. And once a month, we shut that herd up and pull out everything visually that we think is big enough, just ready to slaughter. And that's how we do it. And I don't want to have all of them one month. In 11 months, nothing going on. Does anybody hunt on your farm? Yeah, I did employees hunt.

I was an avid hunter all my life. And ceased to do that when I got so involved with my career and i still have employees at hunt uh that's funny you mentioned that because i was like being brought up um we hunted different farms in our community and my dad was he was just in explaining why i mean at that time farmers didn't hunt i mean they did not hunt. In our area, my dad's like, the last thing these people want to deal with is a dead animal. He's like, it's just like the end of the day,

you want to go out and have another dead thing, you know, you got to mess with it because it's just not like a fun thing for them. Well, the way that worked in my community growing up is when we were kids, we were avid hunters and fishermen and trappers because that's what you did. My dad didn't know how to play baseball. He wasn't going to be able to tell me how to, you know, that wasn't something that happened.

So the way we kids spent our time was, and the television was a black and white television about that big, and I'm going to watch that. So we hunted and fished and trapped. And at a certain age, your daddy said, you're coming with me tomorrow. 10, 12, 14, depends on the kid and the daddy. And then you were working. And, you know, I mean, it wasn't that I didn't have time to hunt or fish.

I did. I just had my interest. Oh, you mean when he said you're coming with me, he meant working. Yeah. Not hunting. Yeah. He's pulling you off hunting. Correct.

He's pulling you off of hunting and fishing to get working. Yeah. And I could still have hunted and fished. But by that time, I wanted to run the farm. hunting and fishing to get working yeah and i could still have hunted and fished but i i by that time i wanted to run the farm that was that was my my goal when you look at uh i don't i know you i'm not i don't want to embarrass you but you've been public about how many acres you guys have under control do you mind sharing no uh we own about 2 000 acres i inherited about a thousand acres i bought about a thousand acres uh we rent a little over a thousand acres and then we graze

solar voltaic arrays about 2 000 acres so it's a little over 5 000 acres total um as you've gone through this process, have you seen, what have you seen in terms of wildlife? You had the dung beetle example. But what have you seen in terms of wildlife habitat? Does it wind up decreasing because you need to use so much,

because you found ways to use so much more of the landscape, meaning your goats and sheep have replaced deer, you know? Yeah, that's a good question. And the wildlife has increased, but the sportsman in you is not going to like this much. When you manage for the benefit of a species, you do so at the detriment of the other species. Now, we don't see many deer on our farm. A lot of them pass through because it's open. They're on their way somewhere else.

But there's a tremendous amount of life on the farm. I started to mention this to you. I was driving down a paved road that bisects my farm three or four years ago. And it was late in the afternoon. It was dusk, but it wasn't raining. And I went through a place where the road was wet. I said, what was that and I backed up and there were

millions of little toad frogs I mean fresh hatched toad frogs crossing the road and since then I've seen that probably three for two maybe three other times and that is

I hadn't seen that since i was a kid no i i can back you up on this that's changed everywhere that what i said i can back you up on that like amphibians yeah it's just changed but but i got what i'm saying is i got them yeah no i'm with you i'm here I'm hearing you. And they've been gone, and they're back. I was raised frog gigging and catching crawfish and other things. Amphibians, you're right. Amphibians are like the canary in the coal mine. It's an indicator that it ain't right.

And they're back on my farm. That's got to be from a diminishment of the sides, right? We had 78 bald eagles on my farm. They were killing me. They were eating my chickens. I told you, chickens have not been a good deal for us.

That's not even counting this. There were 78. The DNR guy made that estimate. I don't know how you tell, but that was what he said. There's a bunch of them. And they were about to put me out to chick poach, pasture poach, or business. And we are very.

Because you got your chickens running around out in the open. Yeah. And, you know, it's not like an eagle would go in there and get a bird and eat it. I don't mind that. That's like tithing to nature. You do that. Yeah.

But they would land and just kill and kill and kill and eat the anus out and kill another one and eat the anus and kill another one. So a very talented poultry manager that I had hired figured it out, and our eagle slosses went way down. So we fenced them. So I have guardian dogs, Anatolian shepherds and Akbash and Great Pyrenees and combinations thereof.

And they work great on nocturnal predation. But in the daytime, they go to the woods and go to sleep. And that's when the eagles come. So my poultry guy figured out how to put up that electrified webbing around the poultry house so they can still get out, but they can't. The dogs, it wasn't to keep

the chickens in, it was to keep the dogs from going to the woods. And it was very efficacious. So he was fencing the dogs in. Literally. And it worked very well. We still have some eagles and some predation, but it's not debilitating the way it was.

Yeah. So tell me about the process of doing your book. Did you write it? Yeah. So the Mark. Mark Gerald, it? Yeah. So the Mark. Mark Gerald, yeah. Yeah. Contacted me about solicited writing a book about us.

Did he make you do a proposal and all that? He didn't. No. No? Go on. I talked to him the first time. I told him, I said, I can't write a book. That's not the way that works.

I had never read many books. And he ultimately found a wonderful person to write it, a young lady named Emily Graven. I know her. We fell in love with her. She's a sweetheart. She's about the same age as my daughters, and my daughter got involved in it, and she wanted the book. So I worked for my daughter.

So then you were able to start downloading all your knowledge. We had a phone call every Friday afternoon, two, three, four-hour phone call. And she's brilliant. She would have a list of questions. She'd start asking her questions. And she would challenge you. I'd be telling them a story,

responding to whatever she had asked about. And she'd say i'd be telling them a story responded to whatever she had asked about and she'd say wait a minute you told me so and so i said i didn't say that on july 5th you told me getting cross-examined yeah i said yeah that ain't the same thing. I told you it was different. When I read the book, I couldn't believe how right she got it. Yeah. Well, no, I mean, it's like you're telling the stuff. It's all my stuff.

Yeah, I didn't know if you needed someone to help you with the organization. Yeah. That's back on that linear cyclical. Yeah. If I start telling you a story, I'm probably going to get off on something else. We never will finish that one unless you remind me. And that's the way this would have been um how many people come you know cause

how many people come to your place everyday like if people are listening they can just go if they're in Georgia they can just go to your place right and tour and eat and see everything we got an open gate policy that you can go. We do tours, and I really love them to do that.

But they show up 30 minutes after you did a tour, and my daughters do them. They got people that work with them that do them. But we let them go. We got maps. We give it to you. You can go anywhere you want to. You can go anywhere you want to. You can ask anything you want to.

We're under so much competition of greenwashed product by big companies that transparency is the sword we've got to use. Got you. Short term. You can look at it. We'll ask you a question. And sometimes... Meaning there's no...

Like whatever terminology you can use to describe to a consumer what it is you're doing, you're going to see that terminology mimicked by someone who picks up that word. Absolutely. Let me give you an extreme example. There's several I can give you. In this country,

you can import grass-fed beef from 20 other countries and label it product of the USA legally on the package. Your value is added here. It's cut or wrapped or ground. Is that right? Yeah.

Man, if you want to put product of the USA on a piece of sewn fabric, I'm sure shit's a lot higher bar than that. Well, I'm telling you, the law got changed. I think it was 2015. We were doing pretty good and the law got changed

and then suddenly we're not doing so good anymore. We had a big wholesale customer last week that my daughter was talking to and they

had a, I wasn't meeting, had a video meeting, online meeting. They showed, you know, the stats on how much they'd grown and you customly picked up this grosser, that grosser, the other grosser. They got down to the plan, said they're going to buy the same amount of product from us they bought the previous year. And Jenny, she's pretty tough, she said, wait a minute. You just showed all these new customers you got and you're going to buy the same amount of product. Where are you getting it? Because there aren't that many large grass-fed beef producers left in this country.

And they didn't say anything. And she just sat there and waited. And she said, are you importing grass-fed beef? And they didn't say anything. And finally one of them said, yeah, yeah, okay, we import a little bit. So why hadn't we talked about this before? And I could tell you the name. Because they're chasing that name, grass-fed beef,

not chasing what the implications are. They let the assumption be it's American. They aren't American. It's got a very American name, headquartered in Texas. Got it. Do you worry that the whole thing is going to go kaput and someone's going to have to go back the other direction? It's going kaput.

Yes. And I worry about it a lot. And I really think we're okay. I mean, we've been doing it longer than the others. We started 25 years ago. We sell $25 million worth of stuff a year. We're vertically integrated. We're not doing very well, but it's okay.

We got some debt, but we got a lot of assets. And I think we're going to be okay. I got friends and people I care a lot about that it has not been okay, and that bothers me a lot. I thought, not day one. Day one, I just wanted to raise cows different. But at some point in that journey, I came to believe that I was an early innovator that was helping figure out a better way to produce at least beef, maybe meat in general, but at least beef.

And I liked that. I wasn't living for it, but I liked it. It hadn't worked out that way. And I changed. I went from, I've never been a salesman. I've never tried to talk people into changing up. But if somebody came to see me and said, I'm thinking about going in the grass-fed beef business, I said, get in the Jeep.

Come on. I'll show you something. And I'd show them and kind of promote it. And I consciously made the decision, I got to quit doing that because people got in trouble. And it could happen with us, but we're in, I think we'll be all right. Enough I allowed two daughters to come back and have babies on the farm. So I thought, if you're in business for yourself, you know, I know this is going to be fine.

That doesn't happen. You know what the sad part is? There'd be a bunch of people happy if it didn't work. Because they're sitting there and it's like, man, this is kind of challenging. Here he is talking about

a bunch of stuff i'd rather not talk about drawn making us you know people questioning assumptions and then if it didn't work they'd be like ha good you're right because that was getting uncomfortable and of course of course the you know the large multinational meat processors are so big and so powerful. And they're not worried about how much I sell. They spill more than I sell. But they don't want people asking the questions. We talk a lot about how we do it. It'd just be better not to have to talk about that.

And they've done such a great job again, that term greenwashing. I didn't come up with it, but I use it a lot because it very accurately depicts what happens in the marketplace. Years ago, I had a

we were interviewing a bison producer and that's kind of a, in the West, that's a little bit of a touchy subject, like We were interviewing a bison producer. And that's kind of a, in the West, that's a little bit of a touchy subject, like beef versus bison. And he's talking about a lot of the heat they get, you know, the cattle and the things. And he had an interesting statistic where he's like,

man, there's two million cows in this state. I got 4,000 buffalo. But the amount of the focus on that is like, let's just look at the numbers for a minute here. I don't have that prejudice, but I got 150-something miles of fence on my farm because we got it cross-fenced into 30-acre paddocks. It's not just – and I used to be the president of the American Grass-Fed Association way back a long time ago, and we put bison producers in there, and those poor folks couldn't hardly give away bison but I

started Tess Montana Grill and seeing other things and you know I believe this bison thing might might be alright and I was adding those other species I said maybe I'll add bison so there's a guy in Alabama had a herd of bison he wanted to sell I rode up there by myself one Sunday afternoon. I didn't want to talk to him. I wanted to look at him. I sat there and looked at those bison, and I looked at that fence he had. It looked like something from a prison.

Yeah. And I said, you know, I'm too old to start building 150-something miles. I still owe money from the first time I built this. I can't start back over again. It reminded me of going to see your daddy. Not really. Well, man, I do. One, I hope your book does good. A a bold return i want to make sure i get

a bolder i want to get the subtitle bold return to giving a damn one farm six generations in the future of food by will harris from white oak pastures i hope your book does good it's really it's really interesting um it's a it's an interesting informative read from someone who observes agriculture from the outside. And that's me, right? I spent a lot of time on farms and ranches. I have friends that farm and ranch, but I didn't. That's not how I grew up. I just grew up in proximity to it it so there's always more to learn i think from

a perspective of obviously consumers um you know uh we we catch or shoot all the meat we eat but most people in this country buy meat so it's a great window into what you're buying the history of what you're buying what you're paying for when you buy it. Reading the book, too, just when you're driving down the road and you're looking out the window and you're driving through farm country, you'll be like, oh, that's why that's that way. You learn a lot about food production, and then you also learn a lot about when you're looking at farms and ranches, how to kind of interpret what it is you're seeing.

And when you're looking at those price discrepancies in the grocery store attached to different descriptors, why that might look the way it looks. Because there's a point, like you said, with chicken, you know, I mean, there's a point you're going to, someone's going to walk in, a consumer is going to walk in and they're going to see, you know, chickens on sale for like a buck a pound or there's like, well,

how, why is this holes are selling his chicken for $8 a pound or whatever the hell it is. Um, I'm not telling you, I don't, I don't know how you're going to break on that buying decision, but at least you won't feel like it's robbery.

You'll feel like, oh, that's where that money goes. That's why that's that way. Well, there's a lot wrong with the way we produce food in this country, sadly. And I was part of the leadership and made the decision to go another way and have really been pleased with the results, but ready to admit that the financial benefit is not going to make room for a lot of people to do it. It's sad. I hope that changes.

I don't know whether it will or not in this book I tried to be as clear and honest on that as I knew how to be and people have to make their own decisions oh yeah it's

I mean even just talking to you today you're I'll tell you one thing you're not. You ain't a huckster. Thank you. You seem pretty open to the trade-offs. Yeah. You're not.

But I think if we had more time, I think we would get into, and probably could just touch on it for a minute. I mean, there's into and probably good. Just touch on it for a minute. I mean, there's also a gamble here and, and, and you explain that if, when people look at regenerative agriculture, organic agriculture,

whatever, and you can make the claim like, well, how are you going to feed 8 billion people on that? And you raise some questions like, uh, I don't know that we should feed 8 billion people. And the earth has, it's not debatable.

There is a carrying, the earth has a carrying capacity. There's a point at which the earth will not support some number. Correct. And there's going to be a limiting factor on how many people the earth will not support some number correct and there's going to be a limiting factor on how many people the earth can feed if it winds up being that the limiting factor is acreage tradition industrialized farming is going to be the way to go if the limiting factor winds up being soil water on and on and on um we're going to have to rethink shit.

It's just like, what is going to be the thing we run out of? Yeah. There's so many losers in the food production system that we have now. I've been criticized for being critical of other farmers, and I really don't intend to be.

They came up in an industrial food production system and embraced it and got good at it and have taken risk, and that's the way they produce food, and they see nothing wrong with it, and I didn't either. But there are downsides, and there are risks, and there are problems with it, and they're environmental. I don't even talk about health and safety and all that. I talk about the things I know about, which are environmental, animal welfare, and the rural economy.

And the way we've been producing food since World War II has been devastating in those three areas. Some other things too, but I don't get into that. That's not my expertise. So, you know, should we produce food differently? I think we should. Are we going to? I think we are sooner or later.

It's going to be forced on us at some point. I don't know how bad it's got to get. You know, I quit using the term organic because you can legally have certified organic vegetables grown in a house with artificial lights and hygrosponically no soil. It's certified organic. Now,

there's a lot wrong with that. We could go down a whole long list of things that we do that are I think disingenuous and wrong and damaging and unhealthy, dot, dot, dot. But until the consumer decides to change it, change won't come from the government. Change won't come from big multinational corporations.

Change won't come from land-grant universities. I can give you a bunch of other places change won't come from big multinational corporations. Change won't come from land-grant universities. I can give you a bunch of other places change won't come from. The USDA. The USDA. If change occurs, it'll be because of consumers. And it won't happen with consumers until things get really bad. The food costs more. I mean. The food costs more. I mean, my food costs more.

I hate that. I do, but I can't help it. You wish it was cheap. Oh, I wish. You know, a question I hate is I can be telling people, a group of people, what I think we ought to do to the to make food better for the land and the animal and the climate and rural communities and whatever else. And I think I did a good job.

And they say, but what are you going to do about all the people that are starving? How about you handling that? I got a good idea. Let that be your project. I'll correct it a bunch of stuff. You take that one. I don't know. I'm as sensitive about people being hungry as anybody else.

But the fact is, I simply don't have that answer. I wrote down all the answers I had in this book, and it's a great start. But I can't solve world hunger. World peace either. Man, I hope you, I mean, it's a great book, but I hope you're keeping more detailed notes too because if this all uh

you know if in 100 years people are like holy we should listen to that guy from georgia i hope he wrote something down 18 inches of peanut shells dead cow i give you my word i haven't written much now. I promise you that. How do I identify a dung beetle when you see one? Well, thanks for coming on the show, and thanks for doing the book. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. This is fun.

You're going to hate me, but what is the pub date? Last September. Last September. Last September. Scrub that out, Phil. I just wanted to make sure I had it right with available now. Oh, yeah. It's very available now. Okay.

If you don't believe it. Available. Get it anywhere. Get it anywhere books are sold. Bold return to giving a damn. One farm. Six generations in the future. Food. Will Harris. If you get into the acknowledgments, you'll see our good friend sold. Bold return to giving a damn. One farm, six generations in the future of food. Will Harris.

If you get into the acknowledgments, you'll see our good friend Mark Gerald listening to the acknowledgments. Mark's a good guy. But don't everybody go send to Mark your proposals. Yeah, don't send them all your proposals. It's just, I don't know. I don't know if he digs around. In publishing lingo, they call that the slush pile.

And, and, and I don't know that they, I can't make any promises that he's going to dig around through his mail and find your stuff. So if you don't hear from him, it's not that it wasn't a good idea. It might just be that he never looked. All right, well, thank you, man. And White Oak Pastures, they go on your website, obviously, right? Whiteoakpastures.com. Make an order? Yes.

Yes. They can go down there. They can look around. Please, come. And they can tour the compost site? Absolutely. I'm going to go in there, and you might see me out there kicking through those peanut shells trying to find out what exactly is going on under there.

Everybody wants to see it. And I tell you, it's beautiful. The grass is just high. Yeah. Really? Yeah, it's great. A lot of possums? Yeah.

You know. He's going to want to trap there. We talked about that. If you keep it covered, it's incredible how few possums, bobcats, raccoons, very few. Well, yeah, if there's no vultures. Steve wants to uncover it. If there's no vultures, I'll believe it. All right, thank you very much for coming on, and everybody go check out the book. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Run the dogs to the northwest corner Of the creek if the water ain't down When the season comes we'll find someplace to hunt Lord, they're gonna miss this ground We're selling the farm in the morning All the woods and the fields and the fence And I wish somebody could tell me In a way that it all made sense

Whoa, we're raising hell tonight Even if it's the very last time So long to the good days We'll be right back. And he died Adios to the farm in the morning All the roads that we made in the mud We'll be leaving a lifetime behind us, a generation of Texas blood. Whoa, we're raising hell tonight, even if it's the very last time. So much for the good days There's a new bunch of deer in the bottom

I promised to my daughters and sons Don't know how I'm gonna make up the memory I won't stop till I'm done Don't know what time we gotta leave here tomorrow. Don't know what I'm gonna say. It's too damn hot for a bonfire tonight. But we're gonna be burning one anyway. We're selling the farm in the morning.

All the bucks and the snakes and the hogs. It's a world that's passing from memory. Except in a couple of sad old songs. Whoa, we're raising hell tonight. Even if it's the very last time. Don't give up on the good days Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that

because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24k

topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.