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Breaking the Beef Monopoly with Cole Mannix of Old Salt Co-Op
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What do we lose when our food comes from nowhere in particular?
For Cole Mannix, that question is at the heart of his work. He’s part of Old Salt Co-op, a group of ranchers outside Helena, Montana working to unseat Big Beef—not with billion-dollar backing or slick marketing, but with community, collaboration, and a commitment to place.
In today’s episode, we talk about what it means to break out of the commodity system, the power of cooperation in an industry dominated by consolidation, and how reconnecting food production to place might just be the key to restoring rural and small town life.
This is a story about beef—but really, it’s about belonging.
In this episode, we dive into:
- How Old Salt Co-op is using a cooperative model to rebuild local meat economies.
- Why the beef you buy at the store often has no traceable connection to where—or how—it was raised.
- What we lose when we prioritize cheap, consistent food over community and ecology.
- The hidden costs of a commodity system that favors efficiency over stewardship.
- What it takes to rebuild local processing, distribution, and marketing from the ground up.
- The creative mix of restaurants, festivals, and direct-to-consumer sales that make Old Salt’s model work.
- Why betting on local food systems might be the least risky path forward.
More about Cole and Old Salt Co-Op:
Cole is part of an extended family that has ranched together since 1882 near Helmville, MT. He did an undergrad in biology, then another in philosophy at Carroll College, then a masters in theology at Boston College. From ‘12-’16 he worked for a valiant startup called Salt of the Earth Ranchers Cooperative. From ’17-’20 he worked for Western Landowners Alliance to advance policies and practices that sustain working lands, connected landscapes, and native species. As a co-founder of Old Salt Co-op, he is helping to build a regenerative economy for damn fine Montana meat. He was part of Helena’s 20 under 40 class of ''22 and in '23 was named Montana Ambassadors Entrepreneur of the Year. He and spouse Eileen Brennan live in Helena with two sons, Finn and Charlie.
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
Introduction to Farming Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
In Season 2 of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:00:12
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
00:00:26
Speaker
So Austin, there was a really interesting article that came out a few months ago in the new York Times with the provocative title, Montana has more cows than people. Why are locals eating beef from Brazil?
00:00:37
Speaker
So it turns out the answer is quite complex and actually has a lot to tell us about kind of how our food system works today. So I'm really excited to kind of dig deeper into that question.
00:00:49
Speaker
Really looking forward to getting into this with the star of the article, Cole Mannix of Old Salt Co-op.
Montana's Beef Dilemma
00:00:56
Speaker
Cole, just to get us started and to cover the basics here, where is Montana beef going if it's not going to feed people in your own community?
00:01:06
Speaker
The best way to think about a commodity is just you don't know the details of it other than kind of weight, size. ah So the provenance is gone. And so I don't think anybody can really answer the question of where Montana beef's going. And not that it's mysterious, but just that you really don't trace it after it leaves the state.
00:01:26
Speaker
So Montana has never finished livestock at scale in its history. All this has been a blip in time, you know, to development of the West. And it feels that way to me a little bit because my family got here before we were really raising cattle.
00:01:40
Speaker
And now here we are. And it's, it's, it doesn't take too many journals from grandparents to kind of see back, like what it was it like then and and then how did it develop to now. We raise a lot of grass for two or three months.
00:01:53
Speaker
And then we we're under a lot of snow. The growing season is short. We are not as productive here in this part of the country. The metabolism of the land burns slower. We produce overall less calories than other regions. And so traditionally to get livestock adequately fat, finished is what we call it, you're sending calves yearlings to other states where there's more calories year round. And that intensifies once monoculture grain production really kicks in Once you've got kind of the bread basket of the country producing a whole bunch of calories, you send cattle that way and then you build the processing plants near to that source of where and animals are now finishing because of the source of grain. So I guess the best way to say it is just once livestock leave Montana,
00:02:43
Speaker
Some of that may come back into our own grocery stores, but you wouldn't know because trace and its origin and provenance has not been part of our cultural priority.
Agricultural History and Practices in Montana
00:02:51
Speaker
It's not part of what we set out to do in U.S. agriculture, I guess.
00:02:55
Speaker
So maybe to kind of help frame kind of how the situation has evolved, your family has been here since the 1880s, from my understanding. If we take, let's say, like the the early 1900s as a starting point, what did the agricultural system look like then?
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, well, but first of all, in Montana, I think it was much more sheep-based than cattle. There was a lot of basically just wide-open country, less fences than there are today, especially around the time of World War I and World War II, to some extent, wool was pretty valuable. So you weren't just talking about the value of meat, but you were talking about the value of wool.
00:03:32
Speaker
And sheep did pretty well. They were hardy critters. They naturally kind of bunched together. You watch them move like an amoeba. across the landscape, they move a little bit different than your average bunch of cattle. Labor was cheap, much cheaper relatively than to what the product was worth.
00:03:49
Speaker
And so you you have herders who have a lifestyle of basically just being with animals all the time. But as the markets begin to change, and I can't speak in a great deal to what the, you know why exactly the we had sheep first and when exactly cattle came. I'm not ah an expert on any of that, but cattle through the winter, you don't need as much infrastructure, big barns, like with sheep.
00:04:15
Speaker
You see these low-lying, beautiful, I love these old sheep barns that kind of dot the landscape in Montana. But with cattle, the calving can happen out in the elements, whereas the sheep are maybe a little bit more sensitive.
00:04:27
Speaker
If you don't have as much cheap labor to be out there with a ton of human presence with the animals, then cattle are a little bit hardier, resistant to depredation. but some of those are the factors, I think, that began to replace sheep with cattle a little bit more. I'm sure it has a little bit to do with people's appetite change in a little bit.
00:04:46
Speaker
Even though sheep remain a ah pretty cool ecological tool on the landscape, they eat a little bit differently than cattle do. And part of our recent wins, I guess, on the Mannix Ranch for it, just as an example, is using sheep grazing to control weeds instead of chemical over the last 20 years. And we've seen some great impacts. And so I hope people continue to develop a taste for lamb. Maybe that can recover someday and we can own that herd sheep that currently grazes our ranch rather than just kind of trading their land.
00:05:16
Speaker
noxious weed fighting attributes for the grazing. Let's riff off of that a little bit. The direction of movement of livestock has been traditionally from the West to the East.
00:05:29
Speaker
So whether it's a cow calf or you're lambing out in the West and you're raising those livestock, eventually those are moving East to where there's more calories being grown, whether it's corn,
00:05:40
Speaker
wheat, soybeans, whatever combination is making up the feed of these livestock. They're born out in the West. They're it's low maintenance, low input systems where you're calving animals and you're raising them up to a certain size and then they go out to be raised further and then eventually processed.
00:05:59
Speaker
And then those processors are closer to the feed and they're closer to the population as well. Montana, not exactly a population center in the United States. So there's not a ton of demand for that product right there.
00:06:14
Speaker
So the livestock are moving towards the feed and the the demand for that end product.
Meat Grading and Industry Consolidation
00:06:20
Speaker
Can you tell me, did your ranch likely buy in finished grain-fed beef from the the Midwest or from Chicago or whatever wherever it was being processed back in the day?
00:06:32
Speaker
Or were you... finishing your own animals or just taking a cow out of the herd once she got to be older and you're processing that for yourself, for your own community.
00:06:43
Speaker
I imagine that it wasn't the case that people were shipping in a whole lot of beef from out east up until the last several decades or generations. Yeah, that's right. We would generally process. A lot of ranchers know that like the best animal to eat, if it's just coming off of the range and pasture, is a three-year-old cow that maybe they just lost a calf in that growing season.
00:07:07
Speaker
And so yeah she comes in in the fall. Age, you don't want to eat too young of beef if you really want good flavor. There's a reason today why people try to slaughter an animal that's less than 30 months old.
00:07:19
Speaker
And it's because of the USDA requirements around bovine spongifor encephalopathy. But actually, you know, a really good eating experience animal often requires a little bit of age And so like this 36-month-old cow that lost a calf and gets fat in the fall, like that's premium. Or the other side of that coin is you just, you had a bull break its leg or you had you had something go down. And so you process that animal immediately and put it in the freezer. That's probably more common um rather than kind of saving the premium best one for the family. A lot of times it was just what's convenient, what's frugal.
00:07:58
Speaker
The other thing is the whole idea of finishing fat and age do matter in terms of quality of an eating experience. But still, it's a bit of an artificial construct. you know What counts as what you expect? you know like What is that societal expectation for a premium meat eating experience?
00:08:16
Speaker
And the industry has been pretty successful at framing that in terms of prime choice, select, marbling in the ribeye. you know It's a standard USDA process of meat grading,
00:08:28
Speaker
And we basically built that customer expectation for meat. We being the the meat industry, the the cattle industry in such a way that it essentially put the bull's eye on this grain finished Midwest feedlot animal that was less than 30 months old and had a very white fat cap, as opposed to a more yellow fat cap that you have when it's a pasture based animal that has more beta carotene in the fat still, because the plants directly have that rather than the seeds, which lack it.
00:09:00
Speaker
You just build this kind of something in people's mind that, well, that's what counts as being the best of the best. And then everybody else has to try to live up to that standard. And so when you, if you tried to say, okay, well, how do we produce that same white fat, well-marbled experience that the customers used to in the commodity supply chain in Montana, you start to ask that landscape to do something that was never really built to do. And the same with the animal.
00:09:28
Speaker
So it's just all about what you're aiming at. But i know you know I know this question started with understanding the meat supply chain and and kind of how global it is. Originally, yes, we sent these yearlings mostly on rail cars to Chicago. That's kind of they would be finished on the way somewhere.
00:09:47
Speaker
But you remember upton Sinclair's, the jungle, Chicago was the home of meatpacking. That began to change and then they would go still be finished somewhere between here and Chicago. But then the packing plants evolved in the Midwest. And then, you know, at least in terms of my family, we kind of had this little hiatus where we had no livestock on the ranch.
00:10:06
Speaker
and then kind of started over. By the time we started over, it was no longer Chicago as the home of meatpacking. And you think of like Excel and Monfort and some of these early cattle feeders, Tyson, you know, later on. And this is where I'm not a meat historian. JBS is, that's the...
00:10:25
Speaker
Brazilian company that shows up in the New York Times article, but they're really a new kid on the block. I mean, basically, they grew through acquisition. I want to say I was reading this book called Barron's recently, and it's about, you know, these seven, think seven food companies that the author follows through their history of development. And I think you're basically talking like relatively early two thousand when yeah or maybe late 90s and JBS has basically has two plants in Brazil and then they get they kind of go on this buying spree in America and elsewhere and become huge very quickly through acquisition.
00:11:00
Speaker
And, you know, so yes, JBS is a Brazilian company, but they... It's a little bit weird to think nationally now. you know they Yes, they're a Brazilian company, but they own a bunch of plants and infrastructure in the United States. Greeley, Colorado is kind of ground zero for them.
00:11:17
Speaker
Colorado State University has buildings named after them. And that all happened really fast in a matter of a couple of decades. So the anyway, the consolidation of the industry has been a process. And this the author of Barron's kind of puts the 1996 Farm Bill as like maybe the worst kind of the the the worst version ever of where we went to this regulatory climate that essentially favors consolidation of the food system.
00:11:44
Speaker
And meat is no different than whether you're talking about Cargill and grain, you know or ah Iowa Premium, or Fairlife, or any of those. like Whether you're talking about dairy, or grain, or hogs, we've continued to along this path of essentially saying bigger is better.
Building Local Meat Supply Chains
00:12:02
Speaker
So to kind of reiterate and kind of get back to the original question, ah typical commodities cattle rancher in Montana would raise the calves on their ranch and then would ship it off to a feedlot.
00:12:13
Speaker
And from there, it would go to and meat processor. And like you mentioned... The processing industry is insanely consolidated. I'm looking here and it says the top four companies control 85% of the U.S. beef market. So that's Tyson, Cargill, JBS, National Beef.
00:12:30
Speaker
And they would basically aggregate meat from all over the country, also internationally from Brazil, Argentina, etc., and kind of all process it together, and then ship it back out across the country.
00:12:42
Speaker
And so back to Montana, you go to a store, you can buy a steak or whatever, a ribeye, and it's coming out of one of these four companies, and it could be from anywhere, basically.
00:12:55
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, from the packers, they typically work with the distributor. The distribution side is about as consolidated as the packing side, if you think of the U.S. Foods and the Cisco's of the world, right?
00:13:06
Speaker
And then the retailers are pretty damn consolidated too. Walmart shows up as kind of the largest retailer of food, bigger than the next eight combined, which that blew my mind.
00:13:17
Speaker
The biggest food retailer, but not just that, bigger than the next eight combined Yeah, 25% of all food in America sold it in a Walmart.
00:13:28
Speaker
Pretty amazing. you know So we we basically, clearly as ah as an agriculture, as a culture, we valued convenience and we valued price and we valued consistency.
00:13:42
Speaker
and Some of the other things, nutrition, nutrient density, soil health, knowing your neighbor, resiliency, those things we have not placed a high priority on and in the food system that we've kind of asked for it and and allowed to develop.
00:13:56
Speaker
Yeah, so touching on that a little bit, if you go to Costco or wherever and you can get this very cheap meat, what are the hidden costs that people aren't seeing?
00:14:09
Speaker
You might buy steak at Costco that came from a tremendous good history. Maybe that animal was raised on really well-managed rangeland.
00:14:21
Speaker
Maybe it was actually finished, not so much in a feedlot, but maybe on cover crops. Then, you know, maybe it was sold to a packer that Treated their workers well. And maybe it was sold at a good price to Costco or a decent price to Costco.
00:14:35
Speaker
But basically, i doubt it. I mean, basically, you just don't know because it's it's trajectory. It's history is not valued. And so people ask me, like, well, they often ask, like, well, what makes old salt meat different than Costco meat? And I said i usually start by saying, well, what do you know about Costco's meat?
00:14:54
Speaker
And nothing other than the price and whether it was prime choice or select. And so I think that that history of the product matters a ton. I think it's the most important thing. It's ah it's a whole, I don't think you can ask a quality question or a question about health without looking at the whole.
00:15:14
Speaker
So you just can't ask a quality or holistic health question to the commodity food system. It's an input the commodity system doesn't understand. So if you then wanted to sell beef to your own local community, high quality, well-raised beef that you've been able to finish there on your ranch or another ranch nearby, what does that process look like? If we want to recreate that value chain,
00:15:41
Speaker
to get beef to the consumer and have ah have the qualities and the traceability and folks having confidence in the ethics of how it was raised. What does that process look like for you now to circumvent that whole chain of processing that has been established and go right to the consumer in your own area?
00:16:00
Speaker
Is that super easy where, let's say, you can finish an animal on your own farm, you can process it yourself on your farm, and then you can bring it to the customer? Very simple.
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, it's the simplest thing in the world. If you just kind of down to the dawn of the basics, you get a neighbor, they're interested in meat, And maybe they trust the way that you do things, or maybe you just, you're right next door to them. And so they know what ask you and you bring that animal to the processor. They can buy it live from you. And under the current regulations, there's these custom exempt processors that can do the processing as a service.
00:16:37
Speaker
You're not technically merchandising meat. You're just selling your neighbor an animal. Your neighbor's having it processed and they buy your product. Like it it's really that simple, but to get out of the commodity system is,
00:16:49
Speaker
You basically have to rebuild all of that very massive consolidated infrastructure from the finishing, fattening process to the processing itself, the meat processing, manufacturing process, to the distribution, to the network of buyers. You kind of have to build that in microcosm if you're going to operate at any kind of scale.
00:17:11
Speaker
So it'd be very simple if you're just selling to a neighbor. A neighbor comes to you, they just want to buy a half a beef or something like that. But if you want to sell retail cuts in town, that gets more complicated, right?
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, if you want to be a commercial, even tiny commercial meat company where you're actually merchandising meat rather than an animal, you begin to wade into a regulatory environment that has been basically set up to favor the established infrastructure.
00:17:41
Speaker
So it becomes very expensive, even at a small scale, to invest in a USDA certified plant. It becomes very expensive to build out and ah an operation that is specifically designed to put that those last 200 or 300 pounds on an animal to get it to a premium eating experience that...
00:17:59
Speaker
Basically, your customers are mostly measuring you against what they expect to be premium. So I think a good example is, okay, we sold to a neighbor. Now we want to sell to a local grocery store.
00:18:11
Speaker
Most grocery stores are going to say, okay, well, you know, I'll talk to you, you know, there's more interest in local food today. How are you going to get it to me twice a week? What's your ordering system that's going to allow us to basically look at a distributor's list and we'll pick your product off the distributor's list.
00:18:28
Speaker
So then you have to say, well, okay, well, what distributor can I work with? And then if you're talking to a grocery store, they may only want certain cuts. There's 120 mussels on an animal and they can each be cut multiple different ways.
00:18:40
Speaker
How do I ah offer that retailer just what they want to buy and then know that I can move the rest of the product somewhere else? And it's one thing to bring a couple of livestock to a small custom processor.
00:18:53
Speaker
But if I want to work with an inspected USDA inspected processor, They're going to probably, it's it's a little hard for them to deal with three or four, five cattle a year.
00:19:04
Speaker
Even the small ones have to process a couple thousand a year to to be in the black. And so that means that they need throughput. So they're going to ask you, can you bring me 10 a week? Can you bring me five a week? consistently throughout the season, you're all of a sudden dealing with a lot of complexity to go from just selling an animal to a neighbor that gets processed in the meat to being a commercial meat seller of meat.
00:19:27
Speaker
And my own family's history in the meat program, in our little meat program, is kind of instructive of this where you've got, basically we raised 1,200 mother 1,200 to 1,300 mother cows any given time.
00:19:39
Speaker
And over 20 years, coming from a history of being a straight commodity operation where we just sold calves and yearlings to whoever would buy them, we then started trying to sell meat
Old Salt Co-op's Regional Model
00:19:50
Speaker
locally. And essentially, a woman from the University of Montana, she brought her environmental studies students out and she said, hey, have you ever considered selling locally? And we said, well, she said, well, let me make an introduction to the good food store in Missoula. Missoula is this kind of little microcosm in Montana where It's a fairly ah progressive, I guess, town.
00:20:10
Speaker
It's got a university in it, 80,000 people, which is big for Montana. And they had this good food store, grocery store, probably been around for 30 years now. And they said, we'll buy whole carcasses from you.
00:20:21
Speaker
So we'll take the burden of moving everything. And originally, we just basically kept animals longer. And they ended up being 28 months old, anywhere between that and 36 months old. By the time they were finally ready for harvest, they would buy the entire carcass from us. 2010, 2011, 2012, we were selling like four or five carcasses a month just to the good food store.
00:20:45
Speaker
And then from there, we began working with a few restaurants on just burger mostly. And then we started showing up at the farmer's market, building relationships with customers. They buy a quarter or an eight or a half or a whole beef to fill their fridge with, fill their freezer with.
00:20:59
Speaker
And by the time 2020 rolls around, you have COVID and all of a sudden there's even more interest in buying direct. So we started running a route system. We would go to Northwest Montana. We'd go to Southwest Montana. One Saturday, we'd drive the Northwest route. One Saturday, we'd drive the Southwest route. People ordered their meat online.
00:21:18
Speaker
And then we'd meet them in parking lots of whatever businesses to do the drop-off on Saturday. We found ourselves with this little program that moved about 300 animals a year locally. And the rest...
00:21:30
Speaker
which is still 75% of what we raise goes commodity. And we were asking ourselves as a family, like, man, already this, this local program is pretty complex. We like it because we like that relationship with customers, but man, we've tapped out local processing capacity.
00:21:46
Speaker
They can't take more from us. And, we've kind of picked the low hanging fruit. There aren't any more good food stores out there that would kind of buy another four or five carcasses month.
00:21:58
Speaker
Restaurants only buy, generally restaurants um are pretty good because especially if they're one off restaurants and not a chain, they can they can work with you. Like you if you can figure out how to distribute to them, they can work with you.
00:22:09
Speaker
But they have like ground beef for a burger and then they might have a salad that they put steak on. But they're really only going to move a couple different types of cuts. And so we were dealing with this, man, we're not as a ranch family. We're saying we don't really have the marketing expertise or the distribution chops or the capital to build our own processing plant.
00:22:29
Speaker
Here we are with 300 animals a year that we sell, but a processing plant is going to need almost ten x that. to be profitable. And okay if we're going to run a processing plant in the Blackfoot Valley where our ranch was, do we have the labor force? No.
00:22:44
Speaker
Do we have the housing availability even if we had the labor force? No. So at that time, that's kind of the genesis of old salt where I had gotten ah some experience in the meat industry by that time.
00:22:56
Speaker
I was not back on the ranch. I was living in town. I had come from a background of working in conservation, Endangered Species Act, Farm Bill, Wildlife Migrations. I had worked for a meat company that tried and failed to develop more of a regional effort.
00:23:12
Speaker
And so I came to the family and said, what if we work together with other ranches in Montana to build a brand that is not under any one family's name but is a broad brand that multiple producers can live under.
00:23:24
Speaker
And together we'll build a brand that can move product. We'll build the processing infrastructure. We'll build a team with marketing expertise. We'll raise capital together. And that's where old salt came from. And,
00:23:36
Speaker
I think what I'm most excited about the Old Salt Co-op, this business, is it retains, I think, what the most important element of the small family farm is, which is basically the producers own the majority of the upside in the business.
00:23:51
Speaker
And so essentially they sell their animals to us, but they we yeah we're a vertically integrated company where we are we own the processing and we own a couple of restaurants and we own a festival that we operate every year.
00:24:04
Speaker
So in Old Salt's case, yes, we're multiple ranches. We're trying to be an umbrella that multiple can work under, but they still retain the a real stake in the end food dollar.
00:24:16
Speaker
And that's, I think, the most important thing is that you're fueling the talent. the commitment and the investment in stewardship with money. That's what stewardship takes is dollars.
00:24:27
Speaker
It doesn't only take dollars, but without dollars, it's like plants that don't have water. Now Old Salt is basically trying to build a in microcosm a lot of this infrastructure, including the processing and distribution and marketing kind of infrastructure that you need to get to market.
00:24:43
Speaker
And instead of one big whole commodity system, we're just trying to build our tiny little micro economy for meat that came from Montana. And our vision of a better food system is thousands of those little regional vertically integrated companies that control more of their own infrastructure and that basically can trace the provenance of their product back to a very good history, ecologically, labor-wise,
00:25:10
Speaker
So basically taking the best of ah classic direct-to-consumer model and then scaling it to like a regional scale where it can get a little bit of the efficiencies of scale while retaining that local connection and that place-based element and identity, basically.
00:25:28
Speaker
Could you quickly walk us through the key different verticals or the key different businesses that fall under the Old Salt Co-op and how they kind of work together? Yeah, the first one was actually kind of not where you would expect, but we wanted to be able to test our brand and prove that there was an appetite for what we were doing. And so we found a cheap lease of a kitchen inside a bar.
00:25:52
Speaker
I had a country band that used to play at that bar. Yeah. And so I approached my friends who owned it and I just said, hey, what if we what if we lease that and kind of create a burger concept, of like a smash burger concept?
00:26:04
Speaker
We did that. We found ah our second employee was a guy named Andrew Mace who had grown up in Montana but spent 15 years doing restaurant concepts in Portland. He wanted to move back and be part of his home state. And so he created a menu.
00:26:18
Speaker
And before he was able to move back from Portland, we started staff on this little place. It was called Old Soul Outpost. And we rendered the fat in our own little kitchen. And we fried potatoes in in animal fats instead of, ah you know, whatever, vegetable oil.
00:26:33
Speaker
And we had a simple salad. We sourced it from a distributor that kind of gets those greens from the Pacific Northwest. Not utterly local, but still you could see the the end of that supply chain. You could see the beginning of it.
00:26:47
Speaker
The potatoes came from Whitehall, Montana, from a company called Bausch. The buns came from a a company called Wheat Montana. And so we we started, that was fall of 21. And people really showed up for It was a high-quality product.
00:27:01
Speaker
The bar that we leased from, they increased their alcohol sales by like 40%. like the least didn't even matter to them. It seemed to like, hey, this this works. And we could, you know, because we were selling the end product, it worked for moving ground beef at some scale.
00:27:18
Speaker
Then the second thing we we knew is it's probably not the wisest thing to jump into owning a meat processing enterprise. It's just freaking complicated. We just did not have custom processors that we could have process our animals at any scale. And we knew that,
00:27:34
Speaker
Probably the best way to have stability as a tiny little meat brand is to have a big enough group of direct-to-consumers, meaning online direct customers. That's a stable customer base.
00:27:46
Speaker
And it's not with wholesale. If you get one big wholesale accountant and you build your whole so whole supply chain for it, then tomorrow they say, sorry, we found a better supplier or they push back on price. You're very vulnerable.
00:27:58
Speaker
But with a big direct-to-consumer base, you're a little more resilient. But if you're going to do that, you need the capacity to pack orders so that you can actually you like build boxes and send them through the mail or send them on routes.
00:28:12
Speaker
So we thought we need own our own processor. So we bought a little wild game plant. It was mostly guys who process elk and deer. And we got a custom exempt and a retail exempt license where as long as we had that carcass, the animal slaughtered at a USDA plant, we could then transport the carcasses to our place, hang them, age them, cut them, package, fulfill.
00:28:35
Speaker
So for the last two years, we've been doing that at this little shoebox of a plant. And we also, this little plant had a little smoker. It had enough infrastructure where we could create some cool products that were a little bit unique, some value-added products.
00:28:49
Speaker
Like we do a salted lardo at the restaurant. We do a brazaula that's like a 60-day age. It's usually used in the eye of round, which is analogous to the hamstring.
00:29:00
Speaker
And you just pack it in salt and chili pepper, hang it at a certain temperature. And 60 days later, you have like, ah it's almost like beef prosciutto. It's just a really lovely little product. Then the next thing we did, we knew we had to get a USDA plant ah eventually.
00:29:16
Speaker
And we've been working since we began basically to find the right property and to educate ourselves to build a little team that could actually operate that facility. Know what it costs to process ah ah hog. Know what it costs to process a lamb in labor.
00:29:31
Speaker
Know what it costs to process a beef. What packaging are we going to use? What kind of machinery at this little tiny scale do we need? What kind of machinery will we need at that larger scale? Yeah.
00:29:42
Speaker
While we've been developing that USDA processing plant, we also launched a festival. The first one was 2023. two thousand and twenty three We just said, hey, look, we're trying to communicate a new culture in agriculture. We're trying to get people to feel, not just think about how they really are connected to the land, to each other. All these elements of the food system are tied together. In Montana, you know,
00:30:10
Speaker
a big part of the conversation has always been public lands, the outdoors, wildlife, grizzly bears, wolves. We wanted people to be able to see how the ongoing viability of these large kind of Western ranches can really cohere very well with large wildlife, with basically habitat for like migratory birds, grizzly bear connectivity, wolves, et cetera.
00:30:38
Speaker
And so this festival is basically a coming together of rebuilding our relationships with the land and each other. And it's three days of wood-fired cooking, talks that surround soil health, fisheries, prescribed fire, food systems.
00:30:53
Speaker
There's poetry and readings from authors that are kind of writing across the spectrum of reconnecting with each other and nature. And there's 18 bands and there's a general store where artisans are selling some beautiful products from knives to wool garments and blankets to just art paintings. So we held it and the first year I think we had 1800 people come and we set it up on my family's ranch in the Blackfoot Valley. No infrastructure. We brought in these tents and we built the cooking infrastructure.
00:31:25
Speaker
We lost our butts economically. We knew we would. But we we thought, look, there's a spark here. And so we held it again this last summer, June, in the summer solstice. And there's 2,800 people that came. And this year we broke even.
00:31:38
Speaker
And it was more than anything else. It's just it's a way to feel what the brand is about. And so we're in the process of organizing another 2025 Old Salt Festival.
00:31:50
Speaker
And then this spring, we launched another restaurant. This one we actually own. We bought a building, renovated it. And it was named after the last local butcher shop that went out of business in the 80s. It was called the Union Market. And so we created this thing called the Union. Emma's been there.
00:32:06
Speaker
And it's a, basically it's a butcher shop, but it's also a wood-fired grill. Between it and the outpost, we move the whole animal. And its whole job is to move the entire animal across the menu.
00:32:18
Speaker
And then everything else, the non-meat items that we sell are local provenance. That's really just one more effort. It's never going to be a scalable way to produce cash, but it will be in the black and it will be a way to host people and create this little community that basically wants to be sold to the earth to give more than they take, you know, to enrich their community.
00:32:41
Speaker
And so meantime, we back this year, another one of our big wins is that we finally were able to find a property that would be suitable to to build a USDA process run. We were able to get a USDA grant to build that facility, some USDA debt to build that facility.
00:32:57
Speaker
We're finally at the point where I think we got a design that makes sense, a scale target that makes sense. And by August of 25, we may have that facility stood up.
00:33:08
Speaker
And it will be a lot more robust than the little one we have now, but it'll still be a tiny little facility that is just trying to make a regional difference. Not only our own brand, but it'll process for other farms and ranches that have their own brands. And that's what Old Salt is. It's got meat processing. It's got a meat brand.
00:33:24
Speaker
It's got the Old Salt Outpost and the union. And then it's got this festival. And those things together hopefully will allow us to be able to move meat to our own group of customers and return more value to the producers who raise the lifestyle.
00:33:39
Speaker
That's a lot of complexity just to move meat from local producers to local retail customers. That's a lot. That's a lot of work that you've had to do in order to make that happen.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yes, it's daunting, but I just think it's kind of hard to just... rebuild one element of a system because you're still in a commodity mindset. You know, right now, if you finished catalog grass in Montana and sold to the big brands who buy grass only animals, you're basically just losing money left and right, especially in today's market.
00:34:14
Speaker
And that's not your object. You know, you want it. If people are doing really excellent stewardship, you want them to make more, you want them to be more resilient. You sort of kind of have to step out and take a big risk and In order to take that risk, you have to believe that the status quo is riskier.
00:34:35
Speaker
And that's one of the things that we really believe together. I think in a snowstorm in 2020, the late that fall, we had been talking about this for about six months. I had wrote a business plan. I'd gone to some ranchers we trusted.
00:34:49
Speaker
And we sat down. We got snowed in an extra day. So the meeting was longer than expected. And these basically these three family ranches sat around the table. Each one was profitable at the moment and really proud of its land stewardship.
00:35:03
Speaker
But each one agreed, if we stay plugged into the system, not only we do we not like many of the impacts of the system writ large, but if we stay just from a sheer economic reality, we think that in one more generation, it will not be viable.
00:35:20
Speaker
So is it worth taking a risk? Yeah. So going back to processing side of this, I think that's probably the least sexy, that kind of messy middle in all of this between the producers. And that's kind of a cool image, especially out west, you're riding out on Horseback is what I'm envisioning and you're working cattle.
00:35:38
Speaker
And then you get to the the restaurants and you're getting to the consumers. And and again, that you have nice labels and all that kind of stuff. And you can tell a cool story. But that middle part of it, which is complex, it's capital intensive, it's absolutely not something that most people want to get into when they talk about farming.
Economic and Regulatory Challenges
00:35:57
Speaker
Let's dig into that a little bit. I was having a conversation recently with a farmer out in Virginia, and he farms at a significant scale. He's grass fed. ah He raises cattle as well as hogs and poultry.
00:36:11
Speaker
And he was giving a rundown of the the cost of producing his end product. So you had your your infrastructure, you had your feed, you had all of your costs, your labor, and then you had the processing.
00:36:26
Speaker
I was sitting in the audience trying to figure out what's the main, the like the key point where his model is more expensive than the commodity model. He was raising his livestock out on Pastron, Goodpastron, and he was able to keep his costs low. He was able to keep his infrastructure costs very low because it was all very low input systems working with nature. very good producer.
00:36:48
Speaker
But the processing... seemed to be that was that was the killer because it was costing him about 600 bucks, five, 600 bucks to process a hog and 1100 bucks to process a beef animal.
00:37:02
Speaker
And it was costing his commodity, let's say competitors. It was about $25 a head for hogs compared to $500 or $600.
00:37:13
Speaker
And for beef, he told me it cost them almost nothing to process those animals between the scale and efficiency, but then also what he called the fifth quarter, those byproducts that processors at scale are able to get off of these animals.
00:37:31
Speaker
So it blew my mind, really, because I've been in this space a while and looking at things. I never looked that closely at the processing and just the difference that there is between the processing costs for a small scale producer, which is the the kind of producer that we want to be able to encourage more of and have more of those small scale regenerative producers and just the commodity system. The difference in cost ends up being several dollars per pound on his end product, not because it costs him that much more to produce the animal, to raise the animal in a way that we want to see, but really just because of that additional cost at processing. So can you talk a little bit about what that looks like in your own context and maybe what the addition of your own USDA inspected processing plant will change for you and the old salt co-op?
00:38:25
Speaker
It's really hard to kind of to simplify that down because it is a huge mystery. Like, why is it 10 X, you know, $500 compared to let's say $50 or $25 for that hog.
00:38:38
Speaker
Part of it is the ability to sell that fifth. I think he called it the fifth and there's a company called other half processors that focus on the byproduct. Right. And part of it is one of the things that that big commodity system does well,
00:38:54
Speaker
is that it can aggregate little things in enough quantity to go make highest and best use of where the market will pay for that.
00:39:05
Speaker
So for example, we don't have anybody in Montana that eats tripe at any kind of scale. If you live outside of l LA, you're gonna have a little bit more of an ethnic market that actually demands tripe.
00:39:16
Speaker
You know, like I visited a plant in Toppenish, Washington a couple of years ago and all their tripe was going to Taiwan, Korea, the east So that is one of the things that the big system has done well. You know, tripe is just one tiny example of hundreds of products, some of it being bits of fat or glands or blood that is going to the cosmetics industry, or perhaps it's going to the pet treats industry.
00:39:44
Speaker
Part of it is being able to, you know, like you only might have, you know, a quarter of a pound of glands to sell per animal. And so how do you aggregate that and ship it in meaningful quantities?
00:39:57
Speaker
where it goes, where it's not, you know, you can fill up a truck with pallets of glands, you know? So part of it is that, but another big part of it is there has been such an accumulation of rules and regs for how you have to treat each one of those individual things that in order to build a tiny facility that could deal with all those things, you got to have like 58 rooms and they've each got to be temperature controlled and the capital investment is just insane. And so it's, it's not like you couldn't make use or and aggregate those things, learn to process those little pieces. You know, this particular tendon is that has this one particular use, part of it is aggregating enough to get them to market. But also another part of it is how do I have enough spaces that cohere with USDA hint inspection that allows me to do that at this little tiny plant? And then then there's another layer where it's just pure efficiency. Like if you ever just Google livestock slaughter, like cattle slaughter and find a big plant and it is space age technology.
00:41:00
Speaker
that has these animals coming in The entry systems into the kill area are designed by Temple Grandin, usually. And that animal, you know, just sort of naturally moves into the plant. The animal's knocked without hardly knowing it.
00:41:14
Speaker
All of a sudden, it's on the rail, and it's like got a rail underneath of its belly, and it's floating down. One person just makes a little notch in the hawk, and all of a sudden, it's up on the rail, and it's just incredibly efficient.
00:41:26
Speaker
you know They've really got it down to a science. So part of it is just... If you build a plant that's going to process 1,500 or 5,000 head per day, that's a whole different reality than processing 50 to 75 a week, which I aspire to do.
00:41:41
Speaker
On the fifth processing or whatever, like the the efficiencies of these large scale operations and kind of utilizing every piece of the animal, that i mean that sounds like something in favor of that scale of operation. But I would say another reason people have trouble doing that locally is because we've become used to like having a kind of dumbed down palate. While we used to eat a much wider variety of cuts and types of meats and and there was you know a whole...
00:42:10
Speaker
cuisine and culture around that traditionally. Now, like you mentioned, like we only eat sirloin or one other thing. and And so, i mean, it sounds like part of the re-educating the local consumer is also about kind of re-educating people to utilize a larger fraction of each animal so that you don't need to be splicing and dicing and sending it across the world the area where people do still eat tripe whatever it might be.
00:42:39
Speaker
I don't want to say that there's no good things about the big system. There are some really impressive things that it's done. And maybe one of the most impressive things is they know how to use every part and they know where that part goes.
00:42:53
Speaker
I don't think that's a good enough reason to leave that system in place because of so many things it doesn't do well. Ultimately, what that big system does is leave the producer vulnerable. They are a cog in the machine.
00:43:07
Speaker
It is designed to extract value from the people closest to the land. And that is a system that is designed to ruin ecology over time. It ruins community at the rural level and it ruins ecology. So I am not a fan of the big system, but it doesn't mean I'm not impressed by some of the the amazing things they've figured out how to do. When you don't have to think about stream health,
00:43:29
Speaker
and soil health when we didn't realize how much damage we were doing at this industrial scale. You can see kind of how our grandparents and their generations that created this system got there.
00:43:43
Speaker
But today, like if you step back and be honest, the gains that it made are not worth the costs. you know They basically weren't counting the costs. And you're right, Emma, like I agree.
00:43:54
Speaker
We should learn to use those other parts of the animal and incorporate those into our cultures. That takes time. I absolutely think that less stringency on the USDA inspection level of what kind of room it takes to process a hide or a gland or blood would actually be better, especially scaling those the stringency of the regulations down to fit the scale of the operation.
00:44:19
Speaker
We kill thousands and thousands and thousands of wild game in the state of Montana every year. And people are shooting an animal in the butt, they're dragging it through the mud and the warm, and they're hanging it in their shop and then they bring it to a wild game processor or they process it themselves.
00:44:36
Speaker
People are not getting sick. We've ate meat for many, many, many, many generations as humans. So sometimes the food sort of safety regulation, it's sold to the public as a way to keep them safe.
00:44:50
Speaker
But it's actually a way to keep people in power, a certain system in power. And A good example in my backyard, because now I do restaurants, which I didn't think I was going to do, but we have liquor law in Montana where they basically do not allow you to just buy a liquor license.
00:45:05
Speaker
You have to sell liquor. If you want a food business, it's going to stay in business. If you're can to have a restaurant, you need a liquor license. But whereas in other states, you can buy a liquor license for 50,000 Montana, it costs to a to buy a liquor license Why? Is that keeping people safe? No, it's basically a way for the Tavern Association, people who have liquor license, they join the association to ensure that it's hard to get a liquor license, to ensure that there's not a lot of competition on Main Street for food establishments.
00:45:37
Speaker
But it would be very hard. Imagine the campaign it would take. Imagine the understanding it would take amongst Americans to think that it was a good idea to decrease the surrogacy of food regs.
00:45:48
Speaker
Once that whole thing builds up, man, it's hard to change it.
Sustainable Food Systems and Cultural Reflections
00:45:52
Speaker
Can you talk about the costs of this large-scale centralized system to local communities and what a world in which there were many old-sought co-ops, how that would look different?
00:46:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think, and I don't want to dwell too much on like just the cost to local communities. There is the kind of additional cost to local communities, but the cost to all of us, first of all, is that the living skin of the earth is going down our rivers and out into our oceans.
00:46:23
Speaker
We are losing the ability to be productive locally. And that's because we're losing the microbial relationships in the soil. We're losing the biodiversity that and the the water holding capacity that allows the earth to be productive.
00:46:38
Speaker
And that's that's just not sustainable, obviously. So we also are having perhaps the worst health outcomes as a society that we have ever had, despite spending so much on health care, so much on on on food. Like we it's we are so actually spending quite a bit on food because Americans tend to make more income. We often say, well, we we spend a small portion of our income on food, but our income is higher. We do spend a lot on food.
00:47:09
Speaker
But we're spending and a lot on food. We're spending a lot on health care. And we're not getting a good outcome. Beyond that, we are losing...
00:47:20
Speaker
the local flavor of place, the establishments on Main Street that give that that community pride in their place as opposed to any other place, that make it a ah somewhere, that make it unique.
00:47:32
Speaker
I would far rather see ah handful of interesting retailers that have their own history than I would one Walmart. And I think that we often think about traceability in terms of like, what is the factual history of this unit of food that went through the system? Like, give me the blockchain version of where this this piece of meat came from.
00:47:55
Speaker
But in reality, like, I don't think most people can gain trust in a product by analyzing the blockchain history. If you're a doctor, you could lay out everything you know about your subject matter.
00:48:09
Speaker
Show me all the books and the articles, and I would have no way of understanding it. I would have a much better understanding if you just sat down with me as a human being and explained your understanding of what I was dealing with and how you would approach it.
00:48:24
Speaker
And I basically have to trust, like, is this doctor, does it feel like they're kind of just trying to put me through the system? Or do they seem to really care about me as a person? Are they just trying to sell me a procedure?
00:48:36
Speaker
Or do I trust that they actually have my health and my also my financial interest in mind? Like, what is in my best interest? I think that might be a little bit of an abstract concept, but back in the 1980s, before the beef industry went to boxed beef, where essentially it used to be that a grocery store would have its own butchery department and it would receive half carcasses.
00:48:58
Speaker
And then because it received half carcasses, it needed skilled butchers. And because it needed skilled butchers, those butchers were passionate about their craft. That was their livelihood. And so when a customer came in and was looking for meat, they had a conversation with the butcher.
00:49:11
Speaker
That butcher often knew where the carcasses were coming from. There was a human way of deciding whether you trusted something, a human way of interacting with your food. This is why I feel so passionate about our festival.
00:49:25
Speaker
I think there's more traceability, there's more trust building, there's more ability to get to the root of your food system when there's just a less long, complex supply chain behind it.
00:49:36
Speaker
And you can actually ask human beings questions. You can drive through the landscapes that you knew it came from. You can decide whether you think those landscapes are beautiful. Is this a healthy, vibrant place, or does it feel like it's been robbed of everything that matters?
00:49:51
Speaker
Like it's local people color, it's local business color, it's biodiversity. One of the things I'm proudest about with the Old Salt Ranch is like if you drive through the Sieben Livestock Company landscape, you will find yourself amidst like vast beauty.
00:50:06
Speaker
You will smell the air, you will see the streams and you will trust what comes from that place. Same in the Blackfoot Valley, the same near the Centennial Valley where one of our members is at.
00:50:17
Speaker
I guess what I'm trying to say is we're not all that good as humans, that we can't be a specialist in everything. And that means that sometimes like the data and the facts, are a little bit hard to make meaning of if you're not already a deep expert.
00:50:31
Speaker
But I do think we have an ability to basically take in many data points, many of which we can't articulate, and decide whether a person or a place is basically trustworthy. That's why I would like to see a fragmented, and I don't mean fragmented as in not coherent, I mean regionalized many thousands of medium scale businesses instead of a few massive ones.
00:50:54
Speaker
When power is more distributed, People are more stable. They can afford to be more forgiving and patient with each other. They can see how their own health and well-being and stability is connected to that of their neighbor. you know, you have people able to be citizens because they're not so vulnerable that they're just grasping at the one desperate, you know, option that they think might really change things.
00:51:16
Speaker
There's a guy named John Kempf, who's a really articulate fellow in the space of regenerative agriculture. And he said, you know, It's not that different between rebuilding relationships in the soil but between fungal networks and microbes and root systems. It's rebuilding relationships.
00:51:35
Speaker
That relationship building is no less important, but no more important than the rebuilding of relationships with each other. trust with each other, basically diversifying Main Street, having more people who are able to say, you know what, if I have the talent and the know-how and some commitment, I could start a food business in Helena, Montana, and it could actually work.
00:51:56
Speaker
And it could it could produce a beautiful product rather than, hey, liquor law, just I'm never going to have six hundred k to spend on it, so I can't get in the game. And if you could, as a rancher or a group of ranchers, have more opportunity to say, you know, we think this can be done better. We're going to spend our time and talent and interest trying to create that better.
00:52:18
Speaker
It's going to look like our place because it's us that are doing it. And we'll find a group of customers that care about this place in particular. And they will feel like they're not just can consumers of whatever cog that the system spits out, but that they are participants in stewarding that land.
00:52:36
Speaker
So at the very macro scale, our health outcomes and our ecological outcomes are bad. We've got to fix that. But as you go down further and further towards the local level, it's really about empowering more people with enough to live a good life.
00:52:50
Speaker
We know enough now, i think, intuitively and our all of our social science basically says there's a threshold beyond which wealth doesn't really make people happy. We all do need to reach some kind of minimum threshold to have enough stability to live a good life.
00:53:07
Speaker
But redefining wealth so that, look, even if a local fragmented food system, that that regionalized version versus the commodity system, even if it made food 30% more expensive, boy, that'd be worth it.
00:53:21
Speaker
And most people could afford to make that leap. Over time, like a long time, like generations, where people learn to eat the byproducts and not just you know the the middle cuts, I do actually think that that system makes food less expensive while still taking care of land.
00:53:41
Speaker
But that takes a long time. I think for the next generation or two, we're going to basically be, yeah, 30% more expensive, at least. in the That's it's the meat world because I know the meat world a little bit more.
00:53:55
Speaker
I think we're going to be 30% more expensive on average than the than the pure commodity product. And that's worth it. But actually, in the long term, and once people learn to eat all the products and once we change regulations to basically fit the scale, and once we get wiser with our agricultural policies and stop subsidizing monocrop grain production with the tune of $30 billion a year,
00:54:19
Speaker
Yes, then a local regionalized food system is not only more beautiful and not only better and not only more resilient, but actually cheaper. Just takes time to get there. The dollars and cents is what is easiest to figure out and the easiest to calculate. But there's something else here that we're touching on. I think I would boil it down to our humanness.
00:54:42
Speaker
A system like this that connects us to our neighbors, connects us to the food that sustains us, connects us to the people that produce that food. It makes us more human. It makes us more thoughtful as opposed to being ah consumer.
00:54:58
Speaker
In a consumer society where i'm I'm disconnected, I don't know who's producing my food. I don't know where that food comes from. I don't know. I'm not really interacting with my neighbors because my neighbors are also, they're in their own supply chains in a globalized market.
00:55:14
Speaker
And we're really not communicating or working together with them. We're losing something now in the 21st century where we don't feel as human. We don't feel as connected to those things that sustain us.
00:55:30
Speaker
And I think that's where our poverty lies more now than 100, 200 years ago. It more of material poverty. We needed get... it was more of material poverty and we needed to get have more reliable sources of food. We needed to get rid of famines. We needed to ah increase the so the standard of living for many, many people.
00:55:50
Speaker
And we've done a lot of that. We've achieved a whole lot of that that was missing in the last several hundred years. But now we've gone to a point where it's it's our humanness and that connection to what is what is the most real, what is the most foundational sustaining thing.
00:56:08
Speaker
That's the thing now that we need to recapture. Absolutely. I think that's a beautiful way of saying it. I mean, but what I really want when i when I think about it, you know, I think a lot of people want freedom. They want freedom with their time to engage in the things that they're passionate about. And what I really would like is to be able to spend the time to learn tenor banjo and go play with the Irish session downtown and maybe you even learn fiddle eventually.
00:56:34
Speaker
And i would love the time to engage my kids in Montana's outdoors. Of course, like I want to eat good food. I want to have a healthy body. I want to know that I'm not ruining the landscape. And man, maybe I'm even enhancing it by eating this food.
00:56:50
Speaker
You know, like i think about some optimizers that I see on YouTube or Instagram or whatever. And they they're so disciplined about what they put in their body and they spend all their time figuring out the food part and the athletic part. then they work really hard so that they can have the time to go to the gym.
00:57:06
Speaker
And then you're left with this, like as a human being, just this thing that wants to have this just tremendous physical health. and enough money to sustain that, like that ends up kind of being kind of empty too. Like what we, we want to balance physical health and nutritional health and a a work life that's meaningful with other things too, like friendships and like being able to read.
00:57:28
Speaker
We don't have to travel to the other end, the ends of the earth to just be amazed by what surrounds us. I will never, even if I spend the rest of my life in Montana, I will never have been able to exhaust what this landscape has to offer in terms of really interesting, beautiful things to see.
00:57:43
Speaker
Little communities I haven't yet visited. Being able to do those things is a huge part of wealth and well-being. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you're after, but that humanness, like, yeah, we we have some great modern advantages, but we've got them on the back of spoiling a lot of things.
00:57:59
Speaker
So can we keep our modern advantages without spoiling things, And also recognizing that those modern advantages are not quite enough. We need to recover the other humanness that we kind of left, maybe left behind as we became more industrialized.
00:58:14
Speaker
That is a great question to leave us with. and think that's a lot of what we're trying to figure out on the podcast. Yeah, thank you so much. And I think also what you're figuring out
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:58:23
Speaker
with old salt. So it's amazing the way in which you're combining this kind of big picture vision with a very concrete, actionable plan.
00:58:33
Speaker
We're excited to see how it unfolds. We're hopeful that a lot of others will will come and copy you. Well, thanks for taking the time to let us share our story and for the visit. I really appreciate it.
00:58:48
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.
00:58:58
Speaker
As a new podcast, it's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.