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Life on the Range with Glenn Elzinga
211 Plays5 days ago
Many of us have lost the thread that connects us to our food. Glenn Elzinga is spending his life trying to pick it back up.
Glenn is the founder of Alderspring Ranch, a certified organic grass-fed beef operation in the remote Salmon River country of central Idaho. But describing it as a beef operation barely scratches the surface. Each summer, Glenn and his family, along with a rotating crew of interns, ride on horseback across 70 square miles of mountain range, living alongside their cattle for months at a time, following the melting snow and the greening grass. It is, as Glenn describes it, an ancient practice of shepherding that modern agriculture has all but forgotten.
In this conversation, Glenn challenges some of the deepest assumptions embedded in how we raise animals and grow food. What does it mean to be a caregiver rather than a caretaker? What happens when we let a cow be a cow? And what is lost when we reduce agriculture to a production equation?
In this episode, we dive into:
- How Glenn's model revives an ancient, nearly lost practice of herdsmanship
- The difference between productivity and profitability, and why it matters for the land
- What cows can teach us when we actually pay attention to them
- Why 400 young people applied for unpaid, grueling ranch internships, and what they found there
- The caregiver versus caretaker distinction, and what it reveals about our relationship to animals, land, and each other
- Why Wendell Berry's diagnosis of American agriculture is as relevant today as it was 60 years ago
- Why getting people to cook again might be one of the most radical things we can do
More about Glenn and Aldersping:
Glenn Elzinga is the head guy (aka CEO), and with Caryl, co-founder of Alderspring. Twenty-four years ago, he left his 9-5 forestry job, bought 7 cows and a small ranch, and began producing beef with his wife Caryl. Today, he owns and manages Alderspring (1650 deeded acres and 46,000 rangeland acres) while raising his 7 daughters and producing grass fed organic beef. His passion for wellness as an interconnected web of soil, land, animal, and human health led him and Caryl to create their "inherding" grazing paradigm. Glenn also currently speaks as a guest in both podcasts and regenerative agriculture conferences.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
Understanding Cows: Intelligence and Natural Behavior
00:00:01
Speaker
You know a lot of people think cows are dumb and I've gotten over that now. You know, like for instance, a cow's olfactory bulb is 10 times the size of ours. And for us somebody to call cow stupid or cuss at them or yell at them, I'm like, you don't even know what they think about You don't even know how they conceptualize anything. When they go to that native range, there's there's about 2,200 plants up there and they're thinking about it. They can't wait to get up there and enjoy the diversity.
00:00:28
Speaker
and they get excited. You know, a bunch of these old girls, they might be 12, 13 years old, they go bucking with joy. They kick their feet up and raise their tails and they snort and beller. And we've taken a cow all the way away from that, right? We've put them in feedlots now and we force feed them this stuff and they're gonna die if we don't cut their heads off when they get super fat because it's not a sustainable life. These cows don't have that.
00:00:55
Speaker
They keep living. and they keep eating, and they keep thriving.
Exploring Broken Food Systems and Sustainable Solutions
00:01:00
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here?
00:01:07
Speaker
Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out. But there are people building better ways forward.
Introducing Glenn's Innovative Ranching Model
00:01:16
Speaker
Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
00:01:26
Speaker
Glenn, welcome so much to Agrarian Futures Podcast. On this podcast, we've been exploring the very broad question of what is broken in our food system and what could a better food system look like?
00:01:40
Speaker
And we've also been trying to take a historical lens, so try to understand how did we get to where we are at today and how can that inform us as we think about moving forward?
00:01:52
Speaker
Your ranching model that I'll have you talk about in a second is a very unique case among the kind of broader ranching farming
Ancient Practices and Natural Cycles in Ranching
00:02:04
Speaker
context. While we're losing ranches every year, you know, you guys have made an economically viable model employing a lot of people, employing your entire family as well, doing things in a very unconventional way.
00:02:19
Speaker
To kind of ground this conversation and get us started, could you very briefly kind of describe this model, because I couldn't do it justice, how it's different from the the status quo that that is out there?
00:02:32
Speaker
Absolutely. Emma, first of all, thanks a lot for having me on the podcast. It's just a real pleasure to be here and visit again, you know, just in terms of context of what we do. You know, it's actually not a new way of doing business. and It's actually very simple in practice. It's this ancient process of shepherding and herdsmanship where you actually live on the range with cattle in a very primitive backcountry setting.
00:02:58
Speaker
Could you describe the annual cycle that you go through? Sure. So what we do is we turn them out in April, and basically the snow has just left the ecosystem. So this is a high mountain range. Our our home ranch is in the valley bottom called the Pesimari Valley.
00:03:15
Speaker
And just downstream from us, about eight miles, is where our range starts along the breaks of the Salmon River. And that's about 4,000 feet elevation. And our range goes all the way up to nearly 10,000 feet. And it's 70 square miles. So we're the sole users of that range. So in that 70 square miles, we basically travel about 600 miles across that landscape through the course of summer.
00:03:41
Speaker
With anywhere from three to 500 head of cattle. And there's usually about at any given time, there's three, four people on horseback and some cow dogs. And they just move these cattle across the landscape, basically following the melting snow.
00:03:56
Speaker
It's kind of... this long-lasting, long history of an ecosystem because a lot of wild animals do essentially what we do across the landscape. And that's what we ended up trying to emulate was their patterns and you know when and how they calve, have young, how they follow grass across the landscape. We just pretty much tried to emulate that because we found that fitting into those cycles of nature was actually the most successful way of doing business and actually became, in the end, most
Criticism of Industrial Practices vs. Ecological Health
00:04:29
Speaker
profitable. And it's because it seems like in the beef cattle industry, we've we've tried to turn over everything that nature handed to us with this beef cow and undo every part of it. you know Starting with our relation to them you know as predator prey, trying to domesticate them and domesticate protectionism out of them, took them out of a predation situation. We created a genetic that...
00:04:56
Speaker
could never walk in wild country for long distances. you know We've taken away the physiological makeup of a lot of these animals and made it very difficult for them to traverse long distances. We started calving them in the middle of the winter instead of in spring when they were supposed to. i mean, it's innumerable. We started weaning calves in in the fall, you know and that's almost categorical. Everybody weans calves in the fall.
00:05:20
Speaker
to put them on a semi-truck bound for a feedlot. We put them in feedlots, you know, in aggregations of up to 100,000 head in a fecal dust system fed out of concrete bunks on concentrate feeds that they are not even adapted to eat. So it's like somebody actually thought about this and said, how can we remove the bovine from as far away from their not natural processes as we can. And this is what we have as a domestic cow. So we spend all our time trying to get that back and get those relationships back. you know
00:05:55
Speaker
It's very exciting to see it happen and and see it come together. And sometimes we fail you know because we fail to read nature. But for the most part, i think we're winning. And it's exciting to see that.
00:06:07
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, and I think we remove the bovine from nature because the more you do that, the more you can probably make money, at least in like a capitalist system. The more you can standardize and make it as close to being a factory as you can, the the less moving parts there are, the less cyclicality, the the better for like the machine, but not for the rest, I would say.
00:06:35
Speaker
I think you're right. you know It's a really reductionist mentality. you know And I think the bottom line difference is the two P words. you know ah They're focused on productivity and maximizing production.
00:06:47
Speaker
and And it's at any cost. And we're trying to focus on profitability. And it's a totally different kind of cow that's a profitable one as opposed to one that's a production one. you know i mean, dairy cows are a perfect example. you know My dad grew up in Friesland, the northern province of the Netherlands. He milked cows that maybe produced 20 pounds of milk a day.
00:07:11
Speaker
And basically a gallon is seven to eight pounds. And so that gives you an indication of how many. That was a nice producer, you know, 20 to 30 gallons or 20 to 30 pounds a day. And now, you know, I typically see dairymen boasting that they're getting 90 pounds out these cows. and You know, it's the same genetic, but we've bred it to be this gigantic milk production factory. At the cost of everything else. And and it it is a true cost. And we might think, oh, that production equals profitability just because of the quantity. But the inputs are just dramatic increases from what they were when the cow was simply an organism that –
00:07:49
Speaker
harvested grass, which was harvesting sunlight. It was this elegant, closed system that was designed that way. And we took everything out and started throwing concentrate in those animals and maximizing production. And as a result, they don't live long anymore.
00:08:04
Speaker
Our cows will live up to, you know, continue to have calves 15, 16 years old. In the dairy business, you're lucky to get three to four lactations out of an animal before she becomes a McDonald's hamburger. The contrast is enormous and yet we're stuck. you know I see it even in the beef industry all the time. We're just stuck in this production mindset instead of a profitability mindset. And the profitability sounds kind of mercenary, but it's really favor the cow because you're no longer looking at her net production. You're looking at how many pounds of beef can I raise per acre instead of how many pounds beef can I raise per cow. It's a completely different mindset.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. And it sounds like it's profitability in the like larger sense of it, not necessarily just profitability of how do I make the most money, but also profitability in terms of what's the most efficient, not efficient, best use of an acre of landscape.
00:09:02
Speaker
100% because for us, profitability is isn't only measured in dollars and cents, right? it's It's measured on the ecological stature that we have there. It's measured on you know whether or not we can coexist with elk. It's whether the the fish, the anadromous fish can swim up 900 miles from the Pacific Ocean spawn on a
Challenging Traditional Ranching with Holistic Thinking
00:09:21
Speaker
ranch. It's whether or not my daughters, I have seven daughters and you've met some of them,
00:09:26
Speaker
can plan on being the next generation to move in in place of us it's it's Profitability for me is seeing all those young people come out to ranch to do an internship every summer.
00:09:41
Speaker
That is highly profitable. And thankfully, it also means money because I'm able to pay the bills. I'm one of the... You know, and not in a prideful sort of way, but I'm one of few ranchers that I know of that are truly profitable and not living off eroding equity bases. So I'm just grateful to have evolved that way. I think, you know, going back to, i think a question you asked me off air, you know, whether or not I was an ecologist, you know, growing up.
00:10:11
Speaker
I think the ecological mindset really gave this whole idea a lot of breath and a whole lot of traction for us to be able to think holistically. Because originally I thought we were supposed to do the production model, but you start asking all these hard questions when you're not brought up in it.
00:10:29
Speaker
and wondering why we're doing what we're doing. We live in a very remote valley. It's all ranchers. One neighbor walked up to me and she said, Glenn, I feel like everything thing you do, you make a purposeful decision to do something completely different.
00:10:44
Speaker
in the cattle bits you know And she she'd just been observing that for several years. And you know and it's nothing like some pride thing where I have to re-engineer how everybody does it.
00:10:55
Speaker
But not being brought up in it for both my wife and I forces the question, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? We ask that question many times a day. It make you sad in many ways. It's not a new way. It's going back to the ways it was done before.
00:11:12
Speaker
yeah and they think we're crazy. My neighbors think we're nuts because, we ah you know, we do get along with our neighbors, but they think we're nuts. The worst thing that you could be to cowman in our country, because we live in a country of, you know, big sky cowboys, and the worst thing they could say to me is, you're a dang sheep herder.
00:11:31
Speaker
And, you know, it's actually a really great compliment for me. Yeah. it it actually puts the cow at the center and puts the ecosystem at the center of what we do instead of us. And so in the spring, the the snow melts, you have a crew on horseback that starts to go out with the but the cows and is going to be following them throughout the summer and fall until until the following winter.
00:11:53
Speaker
Could you talk a little bit about the movement of the cows through the landscape and kind of I've heard you talk in other forums about kind of the role of like selective... eating on the part of the cow and how they, you know, move around to eat what is best for them or can be trained to do that or self-train, I should say. That's a phenomenal question because it actually speaks to my heart about these cows. I, you know, a lot of people think cows are dumb and I've gotten over that now and ah they've taught me more than I could ever have expected. ah You know, like for instance, a cow's olfactory bulb is 10 times the size of ours. Ours is just minuscule, you know.
00:12:33
Speaker
So they have this huge bowl. They got a fairly good-sized brain. And for us somebody to call a cow stupid or cuss at them or yell at them, I'm like, what what are you – you don't even know what they think about You don't even know how they conceptualize anything.
00:12:47
Speaker
And it's so tied into what they eat. And you know there's there's other uses for the scent as well, you know asc sending predators. They can smell their calf from 10 miles away.
00:12:57
Speaker
But there's this this thing, you know you know, when you're going down the highway with your dog, and I don't know if you got a dog, Emma, but, you know, you roll down the window some so they can stick their head out, and they just want to stick their head out there at 60 miles an hour. And you're like, who would want to do that? Your eyes are going to run. You're going to sneeze. Who would want to stick their head out the window with that hair flapping and all that and those ears banging away at them? and you know So you've got to ask that question. Their olfactory bulb is not very much unlike a cow's. you know We know dogs are super smellers. So I think when they stick their head out the window, they just experience a smorgasbord of fragrance, of all these scents that they travel down the road with. And I think a cow is the same way. For instance, here's here's an example. example how excited the cows are when we're going to go out and this happens in late April and I see this pretty frequently where a bunch of them will go to the farthest corner of the home ranch it's out in dry sagebrush there's not much to eat there and they'll stand there in this one corner and for a while I couldn't figure out what they were doing
00:14:06
Speaker
There would be the same 10 or 20 head several years in a row. They would just stand there by that corner. And it's about two miles away from home. And it's in this really kind of tough spot in the sagebrush. There's not a lot of grass there anymore.
00:14:19
Speaker
It's been used pretty hard for about 150 years. So there's not much vegetation there. And I'm scratching my head. It's like, it's like why are they there? And then finally it clicked.
00:14:30
Speaker
They're just waiting for the day that they can make the journey to the range, that eight miles. They start, you know, they they know it's about the right time. They know it's another 10 days before they're going to go. But they'll go there to the farthest corner of the ranch, which is still eight miles away from your their summer grazing. They go to the corner there because it's the closest they can be.
00:14:54
Speaker
from that thing that's eight miles away. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're on these irrigated pastures. It's all green. We're feeding you hay. There's all this floral energy, you know, all these yellow dandelions coming up and all these other beautiful flowers coming up in our hay meadows. But here's the difference, Emma.
00:15:13
Speaker
The hay meadows got about 80 different species, which is a a crap ton of species for, you know, a home place. and Most people who graze cattle, you know, in the grass-fed beef world,
00:15:24
Speaker
have maybe five to 10. We have a lot. We have 80 of them. But the difference is this. When they go to that native range, that wilderness, of all those plants that's been there ever since the ice pulled off from the last ice age, there's there's about 2,200 plants up there, 2,200 native plants. And they eat a lot of them, okay?
00:15:46
Speaker
So this is what they're doing. they're they're They can't wait to go out there. Even though it's rugged mountain country, it's up and down. It's low desert, mid desert, high desert, moving into Douglas fir timber, lodgepole pine, subalpine tundra.
00:16:02
Speaker
There's this huge cornucopia of vegetative diversity up there, and they're thinking about it, and they're dwelling on it to the point that they're not eating in the corner of the place because they can't wait to get up there and enjoy the diversity.
00:16:18
Speaker
It just blows their mind, okay?
Natural vs. Feedlot Diets: Impact on Cows
00:16:20
Speaker
Even though they're they're on good grass, you know, they're doing great. Any normal cow in America who doesn't experience native range and a wilderness diversity would never do this because they have no – you know, a lot of cows would go up there and starve even though there's 2,000 species because they don't know that. But the difference is these cows do, and they get excited. They get excited. And soon as we open that gate, you know, a bunch of these old girls, they might be 12, 13 years old, they go bucking.
00:16:48
Speaker
With joy, they kick their feet up and raise their tails and they snort and beller. They are so excited to go and they know the way. They know the whole trail to get there. They know they got to go all the way down the valley, get on U.S. Highway 93, which is illegal in most states, but in Idaho, thankfully, we're still allowed to.
00:17:07
Speaker
trail our cattle on federal highways. You know, it's just a two-lane road along the Salmon River, and they know where to turn. They know they got to cross the Salmon River on that narrow little bridge, and they're happy to do it, and they're happy to get there, and they're happy to put their heads down and taste the wild. They're tasting the wild. They're tasting a wild plant diversity that's not at home, and it's exciting to them because there's all these different things to eat.
00:17:33
Speaker
and you watch them, they're just going from one plant to another. And you know we call it grass-fed beef and all this, but you know it's way more than grass. There's all these forbs, there's succulents, there's salt brushes you know in the low desert, there's there's even cacti, you've seen them taking bites out of cacti.
00:17:49
Speaker
The diversity is enormous and they're just experiencing it all and they can't wait. And it's because they're cows and they have that olfactory bulb and they have the palate that's ready to receive and take care of themselves. So that's what I observe all the food through summer. You know, when I'm on horseback just standing around watching these cattle, I'm just watching what they eat. And sometimes I'll jump off, you know, and kick my foot out of stirrup and walk over there and say, what are you eating? And you'll take a bite and you'll see why.
00:18:20
Speaker
And it's not always super great for a human, but you're like, wow, there's some salt in this. Or there's tannins in this one. Or boy, there's a lot of sugar in this one. Or this one tastes like maple syrup. Or this one tastes just what it looks like, a succulent cactus with a little bit of sweet to it.
00:18:39
Speaker
It's exciting. And then they they they teach that to their young. They teach that to their cohorts. I mean, it's so exciting to watch when you start geeking out on the fact that this is happening. And we've taken a cow all the way away from that, right? We've put them in feedlots now, and we've given this monoculture diet of corn or dry distillers, grains even worse, which are highly toxic, by the way.
00:19:00
Speaker
And we force feed them this stuff, and we fill them up, and And if we don't cut their heads off in the feedlot, there's swollenus ticks going through that thing. And they have all these intestinal and gut issues. They have acidosis like crazy. A lot of them have ulceration going on.
00:19:17
Speaker
And they're going to die if we don't cut their heads off when they get super fat because it's not a sustainable life living in a feedlot. That food is not sustainable for life. It's going to kill them just like it would you and I if we went to McDonald's or Burger King and said, supersize me.
00:19:33
Speaker
If we said that every day, it's going to kill us too. And the same thing happens with the cow. They have the same problems. These cows don't have that. The cows that we raise don't have any of that. They keep living and they keep walking and they keep eating and they keep
Evolving from Caretaking to Caregiving in Husbandry
00:19:48
Speaker
thriving.
00:19:48
Speaker
It's exciting. It's cool. Sounds very cool. And what's the role of the humans in this cycle that you just described? So the role of the humans, i was listening to this guy. His name is Tom Nofsinger. You might want to have him on the show, Emma. He's veterinarian and he's a very like standard cowboy veterinarian from Nebraska. And a friend of mine introduced me to him.
00:20:14
Speaker
He's now kind of semi-retired. He's in his 70s. And he threw something at me that I never thought about before. And it really, really made me sit up and take notice. And he said, are you a caretaker are these cattle or are you a caregiver?
00:20:30
Speaker
And I went, wait, what? Because I realized that we used to be caretakers. You know, we're taking care of these cattle, but we're taking from them in the process.
00:20:40
Speaker
we're not actually meeting their needs. With our reductionist industrial mentality of the factory farm, of the feedlot, we're not meeting their needs. We're still taking away from them.
00:20:53
Speaker
We're taking life and the ability to express our life away from them. But when you're a caregiver, it's a whole different mentality, right? It's a whole different thing. You know, from that time I heard him say that, I was like, I want to be the caregiver.
00:21:06
Speaker
You know, and it's now the test. It's the test. So that's what humans are supposed to do in this situation. They're not supposed to be caretakers, Emma. They're supposed to be caregivers. Right? I'd been thinking stuff like that for a while, you know, in terms of husbandry versus stewardship.
00:21:21
Speaker
I was like, you know, I don't want to be a steward. of these animals. I want to be a husband. and you know somebody you know I've been married the same woman for 39 years now, and you know and there isn't a day that I'm not grateful about that. But husbandry implies a whole different level of love and respect than stewardship. Stewardship means you go home at night and crack open a beer and watch football.
00:21:48
Speaker
To me, it does. Maybe other people see it differently. But husbandry means you're laying in bed at night when the wind's blowing and it's cold. It's 10 below zero.
00:21:58
Speaker
And you're just laying in bed looking at the ceiling and you're wondering if they're all okay, if they've all brushed up, if they've gotten their babies out of the wind. If they've huddled up like we train them to do, like muskoxin in the winter, and protect themselves from wind buffeting, even like penguins do. a lot of natural animals do this, but if you don't set them up to win that way, practicing husbandry and caregiving instead of caretaking, they're not going to be comfortable overnight. And if a cow is not comfortable, I can't even feature it.
00:22:29
Speaker
Like I could never do a confinement operation because I would be keep thinking about whether or not those cows are comfortable. You know, when the fecal dust rears up in Oklahoma and you got the 80,000 head on feed and it hasn't rained for a month maybe and you get this fecal dust cloud rolling up because you got the winds coming off the Colorado Plateau, it's just torching all that dust and they're breathing in it.
00:22:54
Speaker
Would I sleep at night? No, I couldn't even live with myself. I love the framing of the caregiver versus caretaker. I'd never really thought of it that way. And even in caretaking, as we apply it to children, to elders in our society, I think it kind of follows little bit of that same dynamic you were describing of kind of taking away agency, even in the best of instances. No, it's about agency. You're right. That's a good word. You know, if we give them agency, we respect them.
00:23:23
Speaker
We respect their position. And that's what I've come to do with a cow. It's a lowly animal for a lot of people. You know, we we've created a whole class of humans that fills the feedlots with cattle. And, you know, the owners, JBS or Tyson or Cargill, I don't think they're really thinking about that in the boardrooms, about those guys who are shoveling that feed out to them.
00:23:47
Speaker
It's because they're not they're not the people making the decisions for the welfare of those animals, you know. And it's really easy in a boardroom to become a caretaker, right? You know, we just have this complete detachment from allowing respect for these animals.
00:24:05
Speaker
It's kind of amazing that we've gotten here. But when you're laying on the ground at night in cow camp and you've got 400 head of cattle laying down right next to you, they're they're literally like 50 feet away from you and you're in your tent and the wolves start howling at night.
00:24:21
Speaker
Well, you don't sleep. You don't sleep. You know, what you got these 80 to 120 pound carnivores howling on the mountain above you. And you got these animals sleeping right next to you that that they have now come to trust you. That's the thing about this life on the range is that they actually come to trust you. And I sense that they're actually looking to us for guidance the next day. Where are we going now? You know, you'll open that gate to the night pen. We put them in a hot wire night pen at night right next to camp so they don't wander.
00:24:52
Speaker
And the second, for one thing, the day before, if they've been in that camp, this is after you know a few weeks. If they've been in that camp and you're on horseback and you get them pointed toward camp, even though it might be two miles away and it's getting dark, they know it's about time.
00:25:11
Speaker
They'll put their tails up and rear up and buck and snort and they'll run all the way down to camp. I mean, they will run all the way down there. into their night pen, get a drink and lay down.
00:25:22
Speaker
they they They just know the day's done and are reading signals from us about when the day's done. We're not pushing them down into the night ground.
00:25:33
Speaker
They know that it's time to go there. And the next morning, you're in there in horseback riding through the night pen, making sure everybody looks good, making it sure everybody's got a drink.
00:25:45
Speaker
And are they up? No, they're still laying there. They're just waiting for me to go over to the gate, the hot wire gate, and swing that gate open and say, come on, kids, let's go.
00:25:56
Speaker
They all stand up like a choir in unison and walk out. And they follow us. you know So it's a whole different mentality. It just becomes this mutual respect thing. you know They got a job to do. we got a job to do. And it's it's it becomes caregiving. But you know they actually are very responsive to us. And it becomes this respect thing. like This whole stockmanship thing has become this obsession of mine because thanks to people like the Tom Knofsinger vet in Nebraska, I realized that we've been thinking all along wrongly about how to ask cattle to move.
Challenges and Opportunities in Ranch Internships
00:26:37
Speaker
it's It's been upside down. Now, you know my ideal situation when we ask cattle to move, we're up in front of them. We're not behind them pushing them.
00:26:48
Speaker
We're up in front of them and we're facilitating a move just by unspoken language and you know pressure and release, maybe talking to them.
00:27:00
Speaker
You're facilitating their move because you're asking them to do it rather than telling them to. And that's it's turned everything upside down and it's pretty exciting. And so you and your crew are out there every day, waking up very early, putting in very, very long days up in the mountains on horseback. Did Annie fill your head with all these toxic things?
00:27:22
Speaker
Because she probably said, very yeah Annie's my daughter, you listeners. So Annie and Emma, unbenasthemy, had dinner one day together over in New York of all places. So I could see them talking animately over there. And I think that's what Annie was doing. She was probably complaining at you, Emma. He makes us wake up at 3 a.m.
00:27:40
Speaker
So it is pretty early. You got to go out catching horses between 4.30 and 5. It's still dark. They've been grazing all night and they too, you know, they're they're another partner in this whole thing.
00:27:52
Speaker
That is the thing about this whole thing that I think we've lost. With livestock, we've lost relationship. you know So we have this really close relationship with these horses, the cow dogs, the cattle. It's happened quite often. You'll have some elk grazing in our herd or you know wild animals. Antelope, it was antelope last year. They kept showing up in our herd.
00:28:14
Speaker
It's this whole different thing because it's all relationships. on the surface of it, you're, you know, doing very physically arduous things, you know, waking up at 3am, putting in 14 hour day sleeping, five hours camping, you know, up in like pretty cold temperatures for like several months.
00:28:34
Speaker
And yet you have, know, tons of people that want to come work for you. a lot of young people in a time when like, you know, people are leaving the farm where like still every year, you know, farmers and ranchers are retiring with no one willing to take over from them. So I'd be curious to hear you talk a little bit about, you know, your internship program, your your bringing in of young people into what you guys do and what's driving them to do this. What's so what did they see in it that is attracting so many people? It's not money. I'll just start with that. Yeah. I figured.
00:29:07
Speaker
So, you know, and those are good questions because I'm not even sure how to answer them because I really, you know, that is a tough nut to crack because I have been talking to, in the off season, this is what we talk about. It's like, why do they come?
00:29:21
Speaker
Two years ago, we had 700 applicants. And this last year, we actually really shortened the window to try to minimize the applicants. We still had 400 applicants and these are not paid positions. And you kind of described some of it. Some of it is really arduous. You know, I remember several nights this summer where it's way past midnight. These people started at four o'clock in the morning and it's one or two o'clock in the morning. We're still laying out stock water for the next day in the dark with headlamps. People are flat exhausted, but they're still joking. Why? You know, it's because...
00:29:54
Speaker
I don't know what it is, but I think it's like dirt du they're doing something real. there's These cattle need to drink tomorrow, right? They have to get this done. They have to do this.
00:30:05
Speaker
Because it's real. You know, if you're working in fast food, you know, which a lot of starting starting jobs are. You know, I'm sure there's a lot of questions about why. Why am I doing this? This isn't even really good food. I think it's a stretch for a lot of people. And then, you know, maybe they're in college and, you know, maybe they have high aspirations. They're going to become an attorney.
00:30:25
Speaker
or they're going to become a medical doctor or something like that. But a lot of people are just in school for business or comp sci or something like that, and it's because they really don't know what they're going to do, and they're going through emotions. So so they've kind of lost their way, and they discover this possibility, and they're like, wait, we've got to get these cattle to grass, and we've got to live with them all summer because there's wolves up there.
00:30:47
Speaker
Let me get this straight. Is that real? Yeah, it's real. Well, then count me in. I want to go. i want to be part of that. They're now seeing themselves as not an agent acting on an ecosystem, not an agent just acting on a landscape, which has been the human condition ever since colonization.
00:31:07
Speaker
But instead, they've grabbed a piece of the vision that they're part of it. They're part of it. And they're in an agriculture that's trying to celebrate life and expand life and living.
00:31:19
Speaker
My wife hates that word expansion because... Agriculture's been all about expansion you know and scalability and all this bullcrap. But what if we talk about expansion life, expansion of life? We're expanding life. We're expanding biodiversity. And that's that's where we're careful to embrace you know when we're up there in the summer. And even when we're at home, we're trying to expand life. We're trying to build soil biology like no tomorrow.
00:31:45
Speaker
Because we know that builds plant nutrient diversity. All this phytochemical richness and diversity in these plants It goes into them and it benefits our cattle, but it not only only benefits our cattle with fantastic health.
00:31:58
Speaker
You know, we're organic, so we don't doctor cattle. ah We do, you know, if somebody's sick, but it's so unusual that they're sick now and it's because there's phytochemical diversity. Dr. Fred Provenzo was out.
00:32:10
Speaker
And I said, Fred, what are you looking at? We're up on the range and he's watching this one cow eat all these different plants. He said, I'm watching that cow eat. And I do a lot of that, so I didn't think he was crazy. But I said, well, what are you watching? And he starts naming all these plants and he starts naming all these phytochemicals, these plant compounds. He calls them primary and secondary compounds. Primaries like vitamins, proteins, those sorts of things.
00:32:34
Speaker
The secondary are all these crazy chemicals, these terpenes and tannins and polyphenols and all these antioxidant compounds. And I said, why do you think she's eating that? that's That's a pretty nasty plant. And he said, she's eating it because those tannins are actually medicinal. She's self-medicating before she gets sick instead of us medicating after we get sick.
00:33:00
Speaker
So they're doing all this nutritional investment. And meanwhile, these kids are on horseback, right? These interns. And they're watching all this. And we talk about this stuff. And they're getting it. They're getting how all these relationships connect.
00:33:12
Speaker
There's a lot of nuance, right? And you need a lifetime to gather it all up. But they get, you know, it's standing like standing at a fire hydrant and the fireman opens a fire hydrant and into your mouth. That's what it feels like when you're up there and you start getting this and connecting these dots. You're drinking from a fire hydrant on full bore because there's way too much. There's way too much. We stopped interviewing these kids at the end their internship. Instead, this year, we waited two months.
00:33:41
Speaker
The difference was remarkable because they were they were able to have some time to process you know and actually put together some of the stuff.
00:33:53
Speaker
Actually, they had way more questions than answers at that point in time, but you know they were really good questions, and and it was really stimulating for them to really actually start putting a their minds around this stuff.
00:34:05
Speaker
and I can tell you, there isn't a kid – can call them kids, but their age is 19 all the way to 40, okay? There isn't one of them that I've brought to the airport or to a bus station and gave a hug to that we're not crying.
00:34:22
Speaker
you know And it's not like I'm this super nice guy and they're missing me or anything like that. No, they they just are barely able to get the gravity of drinking out of the fire hydrant and how important it was for them.
00:34:35
Speaker
In terms of not only you know building a person, but in terms of causing them to see. like the lights are not... So on the one hand, you have governments, the power that be, educators, universities kind of pushing for less and less labor on farms and ranches. I mean, you also have corporate farms all over the country saying how like labor is the, you know, is the biggest challenge. It's the biggest cost. it You know, it needs to be gotten rid of effectively.
00:35:04
Speaker
On the other hand, you have places like your place, also places like White Oak Pastures, Jules Saten, where like There are so many people that want to come learn from you and work from you that you can't, you know, you have to, you know, send most of them away because you can't, you know, you don't even have capacity. I think an additional kind of misguided assumption that that we have of society is also this kind of like Malthusian kind of idea that, you know, there's this like fixed supply of food production possible in the world. And there's nothing you can do about that when when in reality, you know,
00:35:41
Speaker
It seems to me, and I'm not the expert like you here, but like, if anything, it's labor that's maybe more of the bottleneck. Like the more people you have on land, the more you could probably produce and certainly the more ecological restoration that you could be doing.
00:35:59
Speaker
Yes. Yes. There's this kind of very hopeful and empowering and promising message of, you know, what could it look like if 10, maybe 50 percent of Americans like, you know, did something that was land based juxtaposed with this, you know, our current, I don't know, dominant narrative that's all about getting everyone off the land. Yes.
Industrial Agriculture's Disconnection from Nature
00:36:21
Speaker
Part of the people, I don't blame them, Emma, for making that choice to say, I don't want i don't want to be in agriculture. You know, a lot of it really sucks. You know, you're you're a carousel milker. You got a 24-head carousel. That's one of these turntables that's turned on these mega dairies, you know, and they're milking 5,000 head.
00:36:39
Speaker
And that's a small one. There's some that are milking 15,000 to 25,000 head. They have much larger carousels. These cows just turn around on this turntable. And you'll have people working in there 10 hours a day in the carousel.
00:36:52
Speaker
And it just sucks. It just sucks. it's It's working in a factory. you know It's working for Ford Motor Company and putting fenders on all day. And the only reason Ford Motor Company could do it because they were paying them you know these exorbitant United Auto Worker wages.
00:37:07
Speaker
Farm labor is not that way. There was no incentive in terms of farm labor wages. These people were low on the totem pole wagers, and they're doing this mundane, horrible work.
00:37:19
Speaker
that they say is an agriculture, but it's not. That's not agriculture. there's nothing There's no culture in standing there in a factory all day and milking cows on a carousel. That's unfortunately what a lot of agriculture has become. So we've gotten a lot of kids come into our business here that came from those kind of settings. you know Maybe they're a row crop farmer and their dad's farming 4,000 acres of corn.
00:37:47
Speaker
And but when you drive across Iowa, you know, it's pretty boring right now because you're usually going to be looking at a row of corn or a row of beans. And some people, you know, they like that. They like that kind of rectilinear organization. They like those perfectly straight rows. My father my father-in-law was a corn and soybean farmer before he passed away.
00:38:05
Speaker
And he did like running straight rows. He saw a lot of beauty in that. And there was an elegance too for him, you know, to raise that corn and and raise it perfectly. But, you know, here's here's the interesting thing about him. You know, he ah he used to raise many crops.
00:38:22
Speaker
He had hogs. There was cattle. There was a huge amount of diversity. Even when I was a kid, you know, in the 60s, there was diversity on all these farms. And then farming was this thing of beauty. You know, you you can make it whatever you want. It's all about how you see and how you think, right?
00:38:40
Speaker
Because for some people, they said, this is drudgery. But for a lot of us, I think we saw perfect elegance in that system. you know that had It was an ecosystem. it was Yeah, sure, it was human contrived, but it allowed for natural ecosystems as well to be participants. you You worked on living soils. You worked in this place of beautiful diversity. And you were just walking in beauty on a farm like that all day.
00:39:08
Speaker
And we've lost our way that way. My wife was talking about forking hay today. A lot of people, you know, this time of year, they're in a tractor, they're wearing a t-shirt. It might be 25, 30 below zero. They're unrolling hay out to their cattle with a round bale apparatus on the back of their tractor. Or maybe it's some device that chops up hay and feeds it out either in a feedlot or in a field. They get listen their favorite podcasts or country music, whatever they want. But for me and my kids, we'd rather be on the back of a hay wagon behind a team of horses forking hay off.
00:39:43
Speaker
It can go much slower. But I think, you know, it just gets under your skin because, you know, yeah, you might be freezing your ass off. That's a good point. You might be freezing because that wind could be blowing.
00:39:55
Speaker
But you're getting to be with your cows and you're looking at every one of them and you're seeing the beauty of them thriving despite cold. And you're going to come in at the end of the day and you're going to be satisfied.
00:40:06
Speaker
And I couldn't trade that lifestyle for the world. you know and To me, it's living. you know We get to walk in beauty and it's living. and And that's the way agriculture should be. That's the way food production should be.
00:40:20
Speaker
It should be this beauty. You know, not a week goes by where I don't receive several emails from people who are just plain grateful. They're grateful for the protein that we can serve and put on their table. And they're from Florida, Maine, to you know San Diego, all the way up to Seattle, and all the way in between.
00:40:41
Speaker
They're just grateful. they they They're just, you know, especially at Christmas and Thanksgiving, we get cards from people, you know, just They're not asking for anything special in return. They're just grateful that we're there because they understand, you know, they might not use the words, but I think the thing going through the bloodstream is caregiver instead a caretaker.
00:41:03
Speaker
And the caregiver mentality even extends to the eaters of the food. to To us, it's this big circle of connectivity. You know, when we talk about relationship, being lost in agriculture, man, it's it's, for me, the relationship is everything. It's everything from the consumer all the way down to the soil microbes.
00:41:21
Speaker
That's the relationship that we have to foster. And that's expanding life and expanding biodiversity. I was just talking earlier today to Judith Schwartz.
00:41:31
Speaker
She was talking of like true wealth being photosynthesis. And in that book, she ah she also articulates kind of that. But I think that kind of relates to what you were saying of the goal should be producing more life and in the broadest sense.
00:41:48
Speaker
Yes, and we've lost that. It's a weird thing because you know agriculture is growing things, right? And unfortunately, we're growing things now you know in corporate agriculture and even you know family, large farm agriculture that is pretty much devoid of life except for that one thing we're trying to grow. We've killed everything else. We have absolutely killed everything else. I've...
00:42:09
Speaker
Crawled through cornfields in Indiana and Illinois, Ohio and Iowa. There's not a living thing out there. There's nothing alive in the soil. There's a corn plant, but that's about it.
00:42:21
Speaker
See some deer prints, like deer running across, right? So...
Hope in Young Agrarians and Grassroots Movements
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah, monocultures. I mean, you talk of agriculture should be about beauty. And we've also kind of talked about how, in a way, things are getting worse, and we're losing, losing more and more. you also, you know, before we started the podcast, we're talking about rereading Wendell Berry and how everything that he said, you know, is on point and is even more true today than it was 40 years ago.
00:42:50
Speaker
So, you know, what gives you hope when you think about the future and you think about a food system that, you know, would produce life and all the young people also that, you know, are coming to you looking to get involved.
00:43:03
Speaker
How do you think about the path forward for us as a society? i think that is the path forward. I don't think it's through legislation. We've been trying that for a long time and it's kind of a failed experiment.
00:43:14
Speaker
It's not through education because, oh, You know, right now, um the land grant institutions are pretty much funded by the people that we in regenerative agriculture love to hate.
00:43:27
Speaker
You they're the chemical companies and the pharmaceutical companies. They're the ones writing the grants. to facilitate agricultural research, unfortunately, and I don't see any way to change that.
00:43:39
Speaker
You know, there may be some drip, drip, drips in the system, but, you know, you look at this, for instance, regenerative policy that was just released by RFK Jr. and Brooke Rollins, $700 million dollars to incentivize regenerative agriculture in the country. They're not sure how it's all going to shake out yet. It sounds like it's going to be facilitated by the NRCS.
00:44:00
Speaker
There's no clear idea how that's, you know, what the mechanism of that disbursement is going to be. You know, I'm hopeful that it may incentivize some people to perhaps embrace some regenerative techniques and get moving in the right direction. So I'm hopeful for that. But, you know, if you compare that to conventional agricultural subsidies, we're talking $4 $6 billion a year. $700 million is just fraction. Yeah.
00:44:23
Speaker
seven hundred million is just a fraction of the money that's being put into continuance by our government. Continuance. We're just going to keep moving along the same way we've been doing and keep mining our soils and keep a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and keep doing all those cool things that we've been doing in industrial industrial agriculture now for, you know, 75 years.
00:44:48
Speaker
So I don't have a lot of hope in the institutions. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be activists. You know, on one hand, you know, I'm involved in several things that are trying to change some of those things in in governance.
00:45:02
Speaker
But I think the the heart of the issue is these young people that we're talking about. you know They're the future of agriculture. I mean, look at my hair color, Emma. I'm old. I'm actually not too far off the median age of people practicing agriculture in this country. I think right now that's sitting around 58, and I'm 63. Yeah.
00:45:21
Speaker
and i'm sixty three What that means is somebody's going to have to replace us, you know, unless we continue expanding it expanding and half of us get out of agriculture and the other half can keep going at the same size we're going, right? I guess that's how some people think about it or, you know, perhaps they'll be corporately owned and we'll just have labor and autonomous tractors running the agricultural enterprises in our country.
00:45:48
Speaker
But I think the real hope is these young people. And it's getting them to see. And it's getting them just like I did. you know, I came from a non-agricultural background. My dad had already quit dairy farming when I was a kid.
00:46:02
Speaker
And we were out of it as a family. But it was that very thing that allowed me to see differently. And it's the same thing with all these kids. I get coming from every walk of life. They come from cities. They come from the country. They're able to see differently much quicker.
00:46:17
Speaker
because they have no preconceived notions is about in the way things are supposed to be. My wife told me today that there's this irony happening in social media right now. People are actually quitting Instagram.
00:46:28
Speaker
And I'm like, you're kidding. How can a person, how can a 20-something or a millennial say, I'm going to quit and hang up Instagram? How am I going to stay in touch with people? I said to my wife, what are they doing? She said, they're they're writing letters. I said, what does that mean?
00:46:44
Speaker
They're just on their sending emails? She said, no, they're actually taking a pen and they're taking paper and they're writing an address on an envelope. And it's the new thing. It's the new rage. I mean, this is how my wife and I corresponded when we were kids, you know, before we got married. ah We wrote letters to each other. And, you know, I thought, you know, maybe there is hope for millennials and Gen Zs after all. You know, because we we tend to, you know, as older people tend to make jokes about them. And I hope you don't take it wrongly, em mean Emma. But, you know, sometimes we say, Ted Gummett, they're always on their phones. You know, and this I'm sure heard it all.
00:47:15
Speaker
But, you know, the fact that... They're doing that is kind of analogous to us going back to sheep herding, right? You know, it means they're thinking that there's a different way.
00:47:26
Speaker
They're refining communication back into this way that's actually kind of resounding in how I think. You know, it's like, you know, maybe there is hope. If they're doing that, if they're getting off social media and they're writing letters, that's a glimmer of hope for me that this culture – of young agrarians holds all the hope. They hold all the cars because we're out of it, right?
00:47:51
Speaker
And the fact that some of us, you know, and I know all these guys, that's why I said you got all these rock stars on your podcast so far. You know, I know most of the people that you've had on your podcast and some of our friends, you know, just respect those gentlemen and gals so much, you know, for what they've been through.
00:48:11
Speaker
and what they've done. You know, I think that, you know, there's enough of us out there that maybe, maybe we can move the needle and start expanding this idea that there is hope.
00:48:22
Speaker
And the hope isn't, you know, in conventional agriculture. The hope is in the soil. And the hope is in like reinstating. We've got to reinstate all these relationships, you know, of of husbandry, of being of being caregivers instead caretakers.
00:48:40
Speaker
And I think the only way we're, you know, can you ever imagine Congress passing a bill called the caregiver bill? This is to replace the caretaker. No, it's never going to happen. You know, it's an oxymoron for governance or university educators to give seminars on and classes on caregiving. It's bullshit. You know, it's never going to happen. But what could happen is that, you know, we we do a full send on the ground with these people. You know, like my my daughters. My and daughters are – one is I'm a little worried about it. She's probably going to move on into PhD program and it's related to comp sci. But the crazy, crazy thing about it, Emma, is she's probably going to like tie in with plant ecology on rangelands. Yeah. So she's really not that – she's going to come full circle and be back on a rant someday, I think, you know, with a PhD just like my wife did.
00:49:33
Speaker
Be part of that culture of caregiving instead of caretaking, you know. So I have a lot of hope for the young generation. i really do. I'm excited. That's where our hope is. That's the answer.
00:49:45
Speaker
It's actually the short answer because it's the one that makes the most sense. None of the other things we've entrusted to the progress, quote unquote, in agriculture has been trustworthy in doing so.
00:49:57
Speaker
Not one of them. They've had agency, all the agency in the world, but they're unable to separate this thing of productivity and stockholder profitability.
00:50:13
Speaker
It's not farmer profitability. It's stockholder profitability. And they can't divorce themselves from that. It's just wound way too tightly into the system. So I don't have any hope in it, ah but I do have hope on the land and I do have hope by putting these people on
Reconnecting with Agriculture Through Cooking
00:50:28
Speaker
the land.
00:50:28
Speaker
What do you think? what's what Is there any other directions we should be looking at No, I think I agree with you. I mean, I think it's people and it's culture and it's hoping that, not that it was successful even maybe productive, but like, you know, in the 60s, 70s, you saw the counterculture movement of like people, you know, being fed up with the status quo and, you know, moving back to the land. And I think at one point, like,
00:50:56
Speaker
10% of all Americans between the age of 20 and 30 tried to do a Back to the Land project. And from my understanding, it was quite misguided and naive and in some cases even problematic.
00:51:08
Speaker
But still, there was like this like mass counterculture movement. And I think it it's just going to take enough people kind of waking up maybe for lack of a better world a word. Yeah. That movement delivered a lot of value, though, Emma.
00:51:23
Speaker
I mean, you're not wrong in bringing that up. It delivered a ton of value. I mean, think of like organic, for instance. Organic came from that. I'm certified organic, and it's why we have food we can trust in the market today. And yeah, people get hung up.
00:51:37
Speaker
about the corruption in organic and corporate organic. But here's deal. think the number is around 95%. 95% of the organic producers just in America are still small family farmers like me. They're still very small.
00:51:52
Speaker
Just a family unit. And it's only 5% are... the the corporate toxicity that we see, you know, in terms of abuse and graft and corruption, especially at a multinational level. So, you know, that crazy hippie movement,
00:52:12
Speaker
That explorative movement of the 60s and early 70s, that was a brainchild of organic. That's what made it happen. That's what but made rachel carson's Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, become something that actually changed things. It changed the landscape of chemical use in America.
00:52:31
Speaker
So is there was value there. And we can do it all over. And it happened. It started from the grassroots level. There was no governance that was supporting that countercultural movement, right? And so I think that's probably the i think that's the way of agency today. We have to do the same thing over again.
00:52:51
Speaker
And I think getting people to think for themselves, that is challenging. And I think it's more and more challenging as we're more and more detached from the land, from each other, and we're like outside possibilities, outside of this like capitalist, materialistic, consumer-driven society are more and more erased from and where we spend more and more time on on our phones and our computers just losing the capacity.
00:53:21
Speaker
You know, I wish my wife was sitting next to me because you could ask her what the solution is, and she would make it very simple. Her belief is that we've got to get people to cook again. We've just got to get people to cook, cook their food again.
00:53:34
Speaker
yeah know, and it's crazy because I didn't even think of it because all of our customers, this is weird, the all of my customer base, cooks. It's by definition. If you buy beef from us, you're going to cook it, right? You're not going to have somebody else process it for you. you know Sure, we process it and you get a fresh ribeye, boom, you know or a fresh pound of ground beef, but you have to know what to do with it. And it's not rocket science, you know but it really transforms the whole culture of food and the fact that we don't cook anymore. It's transformative. And
00:54:08
Speaker
If we could get people to cook again, i think they'll begin to see again. It's pretty simple. We just got to get them to cook again. You know, unfortunately, a lot of us farmers are even say we're organic. We're still producing a crop that maybe enters the commodity slipstream and gets produced into organic Cheerios or whatever by General Mills. Here we are back to square one. We're still in a consumer culture that's detached from the grower of the food and they don't know how to cook.
00:54:38
Speaker
So anyway, I think that's actually a really brilliant idea she has. So that's it, Emma. We've got to get the millennials and the Gen Zs to become activists and cook at the same time, and it will change the world.
00:54:54
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
00:55:05
Speaker
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