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Restoring the Oak Savanna Through Farming with Peter Allen
340 Plays8 months ago
In this conversation, Peter Allen of Mastadon Valley Farm challenges everything you think you know about climate change, eating beef, and the potential for food abundance grown regeneratively on the land. He brings a unique perspective as both a seasoned academic ecologist and someone with practical experience creating a profitable regenerative farming business.
In this episode, we cover:
- How Peter made the jump from academia into full time regenerative farming
- How management and stewardship of the land by indigenous people brought about the rich topsoil in the midwest - and how we’re quickly destroying that
- The environmental value of a savanna ecosystem, and how they’re going about restoring it
- The short term challenges - and long term advantages - of farming regeneratively
- Why eating regenerative beef is actually good for you and the environment
- How each of us can restore our land through our diet and purchasing choices
- The potential for layered commercial enterprises on the land for greater profitability and efficiency
- How the conversation around climate change disempowers people to make change, and why we should talk more about ecosystem restoration.
- And much more...
More about Peter:
Peter is an ecologist-turned-farmer and applies his background researching and teaching ecology and complex systems science towards the design, restoration, and management of diverse and agriculturally productive ecosystems. He owns and operates Mastodon Valley Farm, a 220-acre regenerative farm in Southwestern Wisconsin where he has built a timber-frame homestead from the farm's trees, planted thousands of fruit and nut trees, and grazes cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry across their fertile valleys, steep hillsides, and restored native prairie pastures. Peter and his wife Maureen grow their family's food on their homestead where they are homeschooling their children nestled in a grove of oak trees. Peter combines his background with over a decade researching and teaching ecology and complexity science together with over a decade of experience farming regeneratively to provide unique and effective consulting and educational opportunities, helping people design, build, and manage diverse, ecologically functional, and economically profitable agroecosystems.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song.
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Transcript
Impact of Meal Choices on Land Management
00:00:01
Speaker
The decisions that you make three meals a day is going to affect 40 to 100 acres of land. I was at a bar once telling somebody what I was doing. He was like, well, I don't have 100 acres. I can't do any restoration. I'm like, are you kidding? You eat three meals a day. That equals 100 acres over your lifetime of land that you are 100% responsible for determining what happens there.
00:00:25
Speaker
You don't have to be the one driving the tractor or moving the cows to be able to say like on my abstract hundred acres that I'm going to decide on what to do over my lifetime, I want regenerative grass-fed beef and not a CAFO. We all have the power to do that.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:48
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Ratcliffe. And I'm Austin Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
00:01:17
Speaker
Welcome to Agrarian Futures.
Meet Peter Allen: Innovator in Regenerative Agriculture
00:01:19
Speaker
Today, I'm very excited to be able to have a conversation with Peter Allen of Mastrone Valley Farm. Peter is someone who's really pushing the envelope of how far regenerative agriculture can go in a way that is profitable and business oriented. So I'm really excited to have this conversation. Peter, thank you for joining us. And could you set the stage for us and tell us a little bit about yourself and your farm and how you got to be where you are today?
00:01:45
Speaker
Sure.
From Academia to Farming: Peter Allen's Journey
00:01:46
Speaker
So yeah, Peter Allen, our farm is in southwestern Wisconsin. We've been at our location for 11 years now. This is our 11th season.
00:01:55
Speaker
We run a diverse multi-species grazing farm. We sell meat as our primary economic engine. I wasn't ever planning on starting a farm. I don't come from a farm or a farming family. I actually came from academia and I was doing research and teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for graduate school there and a PhD program for about 10 years. And my dissertation was on restoring the historic oak savannas.
00:02:23
Speaker
It was the ecosystem that was here in the Midwest for many thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Europeans. And it's kind of the target for a lot of restoration ecologists and realizing it wasn't working very well. And the way we do restoration.
00:02:39
Speaker
at
Understanding Historical Oak Savanna Ecosystems
00:02:40
Speaker
least in the midwest from an academic perspective it's not very holistic it's very reductionist so you're looking at piece of land you're saying like okay here's invasive species we want to get rid of and then we want to give it back to nature so we let it go the paradox is that if you let a piece of land
00:02:56
Speaker
Go in the eastern united states east of the mississippi river it turns into forest it doesn't turn into a tall grass prairie or an oak savannah so what happens is you go and you spend a lot of money and hand to hand combat and chemical warfare taking out invasive species and it all just grows back up again five six years later and right back from start of waste a lot of money and ecologically doesn't actually do much.
00:03:18
Speaker
And so I was really frustrated by that. And so I was trying to figure out like, well, how did these oak savanna systems function before the Europeans? Because clearly they were widespread. There were savannas from the east coast to the west coast for millennia without people necessarily planning for it. And what I realized is that through lots of interdisciplinary research, including like archaeology,
00:03:43
Speaker
is that Native Americans were managing for these systems on purpose in a form of agriculture, because they are not only ecologically the most diverse functional and productive ecosystems, they produce the most food for humans. And so it was an actual agricultural system using a form of rotational grazing, using fire to move large herds of bison around the landscape, as well as intentionally planting trees, which we know that was happening at some
The Human Role in Shaping North America's Ecology
00:04:11
Speaker
scale. And so
00:04:12
Speaker
through a combination of burning as a tool to move livestock around and horticulture moving plant species around for food. Most of North America was essentially managed for food production. And we think of North America's history as being a wilderness that there were hunter-gatherers going around and picking berries.
00:04:33
Speaker
digging up some roots and maybe shooting some deer here and there. But we think of it as like passive management, like they were just living in a wilderness. And what I discovered was that's very far from the truth and that actually the ecology of North America was created and maintained and managed by people.
00:04:49
Speaker
for thousands and thousands of years, which is why when you remove people from the landscape, you don't get tall grass prairie in Oak Savannah, you get a relatively low diversity, relatively low ecosystem functioning music forest in fairly short order. And so I kind of realized because of the inadequacies of the current models of ecological restoration, that the only way to restore these systems at scale was to do it agriculturally because that's how they were functioning before.
Creating Scalable Ecological Restoration Models
00:05:17
Speaker
We call ourselves Mastodon Valley Farm because we actually had oak savannas around for millions of years prior to humans being here burning, and it was the megafauna that created the savannas. They ate the trees. Native Americans were burning to clear the brush and to clear out the forest, but the mastodons were eating whole trees and whole groves of trees. And so we've actually had these savannas for millions and millions of years in North America.
00:05:44
Speaker
It's only in the last really hundred years that we've lost them. They're now considered the most endangered ecosystem in North America, the Oak Savannah. And so I decided to instead of continuing my route and my pathway in academia, writing papers and writing books about this subject, I looked at my professors that I was working with and colleagues and seeing they were all writing books, kind of telling people what they should do. And I didn't seem to be getting them a lot of traction. Not a lot of people are reading those journal articles. It's very reductionist.
00:06:14
Speaker
And I just decided if I want to have impact, I would be much better off just trying to do it. I decided to quit the Academy and try this idea out, see if it can be profitable. If it can be profitable, then it can scale on the landscape. And so my big goal was like, can I do this ecological work in a way that is profitable and then can
00:06:35
Speaker
then be replicated elsewhere. So basically my dissertation was a creating a model to integrate multi-species grazing and tree crops or agroforestry in a way that creates agricultural replicas of the oak savannah ecosystems. That was 10-12 years ago and now we're still doing it.
00:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, incredible. So you came to this from an academic lens first, studying complex systems and the Oakes Havana, and you realize that the best way to restore these systems is through farming and for-profit model, as opposed to the traditional conservation model as it's currently applied.
Challenges and Rewards of Transitioning to Farming
00:07:12
Speaker
What was it like going from this kind of academic perspective, studying these practices,
00:07:19
Speaker
to actually taking the first steps and starting to farm, especially coming from a non farming background.
00:07:25
Speaker
It was equally difficult and equally fulfilling and awesome and fun. And I mean, I wasn't super happy in the Academy from a holistic perspective. It's like I enjoyed the subjects that I was working on. I enjoyed the discourse, but like I'm sitting in front of a computer screen way too many hours every day. And so I didn't even realize how unhealthy I was then until I got out of it and got a much healthier and more fulfilling lifestyle.
00:07:52
Speaker
So a whole bunch of different things I'd love to get into here.
Tools for Recreating Historical Savannas
00:07:56
Speaker
Let's start off with going back to the Savannah ecosystem. I'm curious to hear you reflect on what tools are you using now? Is it fire? Is it livestock? Is it a combination of the two? And how does that create a Savannah ecosystem that is different or similar to the Savannah ecosystems that have existed historically on that land?
00:08:20
Speaker
Sure. To answer that question, I'll back up just a little bit and maybe define what a savannah ecosystem is, which is just a grassland. It's a continuous cover of grass on the ground with scattered trees and shrubs. They could be widely scattered. The trees could be hundreds and hundreds of feet apart. You might only have a couple of trees on an acre, or it could be up to
00:08:42
Speaker
closing in on 40 to 50% canopy cover. But once you get more than 40%, you start losing your grasses. And if you start losing your grasses, that's when you get a positive feedback in the development of woody plants. And it turns into forest really quickly, especially in areas with adequate humidity, which Eastern America has plenty of humidity and moisture to grow forests. And so that's generally what happens with succession. So if you look at our property from Google Earth,
00:09:09
Speaker
it's approximately 50% open and 50% tree cover. The problem is that it's like 100 acres of forest and 100 acres of open pasture, right? So I've got way too many trees in one place and not enough trees in the other place. So our strategy for restoring these savannah systems is to plant trees in the open areas
00:09:34
Speaker
and to clear out trees in the closed areas and the closed areas are really interesting. In some areas you have maybe an old growth forest. We don't have that we actually have degraded savannahs so we've got open grown
00:09:50
Speaker
200 year old oak and maple trees whose crowns may be 80 feet wide were clearly reg grew up for 100 years over grass with no competition from other plants and now in the last 40 to 50 years
00:10:07
Speaker
it's all grown up in woods around them. So you've got these really old legacy savanna trees, and then you've got thousands and thousands and thousands of young 10, 20 to 30 year old sort of mixed Eastern hardwood species. And so we clear out those younger trees, but the legacy trees are dying now, they're dropping limbs, they're on their last legs. So we're trying to find the regeneration targeting which individuals
00:10:33
Speaker
are regenerating that we can protect from grazing to be a replacement tree in that future savannah thinking about like what the landscape is going to look like you know when my grandchildren or great grandchildren see it and thinking long term because the one thing about a savannah is it is a very dynamic system right so if you say like this land was savannah for thousands of years savannah's kind of it's not like a steady state we might think of a forest as being a pretty steady state like
00:11:02
Speaker
Forest is a forest. Yeah, a tornado might come and knock down a bunch of trees, but there's gonna be replacement trees and you're not even gonna know in 10 or 20 years, right? Grassland is wide open. It's kind of a steady state. Savannah is always shifting and moving around. So there's woody plants growing up, falling down, getting eaten, moving around. So it's like shifting mosaics. And so it requires a little more flexibility and thinking and thinking through time
00:11:28
Speaker
Like I don't get hung up on, hey, there's a big patch of shrubs over there. That's not technically Savannah, but it's like those are short-lived shrubs. Like in 10 years, they're gone, right? So it matters how we manage over that next 10 years to where it's going to go. It doesn't so much matter that those are right there right now.
00:11:45
Speaker
So your strategy is to clear trees in areas where there are trees and plant trees in areas that are just open spaces. What's the role of livestock within that? I imagine some of the small shrubs, they can clear themselves, but how do they come into play?
00:12:00
Speaker
Well, the livestock manage the vegetation. So depending on what our vegetation management objectives are, we'll determine what classes, what species, and our frequency and magnitude of grazing events. And so with our target being a more open savanna, my biggest challenge is managing the growth of prickly shrubs. I mean, we have multi-floor rows, which was brought here intentionally by the government back in the 70s for wildlife cover.
00:12:30
Speaker
and it's now just completely taken over and pastured areas. It just takes over pastures really quickly. So we have goats to manage that. I also use a tractor with a flail mower. I use chainsaws. I use loppers and pruners. I mean, whatever tree cutting device you can use, I have and utilize in one context or another. I have to cut down many, many more trees than I need to plant.
00:12:55
Speaker
basically, right? Because because I'm coming from these like really early succession forests or woodlands, it's not forest. And so, you know, in one acre, there might be thousands of trees that need to be cut versus an acre of open ground where I'm going to plant like four trees, right, five trees or something. And in the kind of non non farming conventional world, we tend to think of forests as good.
00:13:20
Speaker
That's how we're going to sequester carbon. So can you talk a little bit about why you're a little bit doing the reverse of that? You're trying to thin out forests and turn them into savannas. And what's the advantage of a savanna versus a closed canopy forest?
Human Benefits of Diverse Oak Savannas
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, well, there's many advantages. And I am not against closed canopy forests, especially in certain contexts and certain places. I've got a north facing draw with really old sugar maples and basswoods with high quality spring ephemerals.
00:13:48
Speaker
I'm not going to tell you where the ginseng is, but there might be ginseng out there. There's, you know, like high quality stuff that doesn't grow except in very high quality old growth forests. Like I'm not clearing those out, right? And I would never suggest like if you live in the Appalachians and you've got classic old growth forests, that's not what we're talking about. The fact is in North America, and especially in our region, because basically the story is these oak savannas,
00:14:15
Speaker
the byproduct of the way the Native Americans managed was to build topsoil. So they built, in some cases, up to 20 feet of topsoil through their practices of burning and grazing, burning and grazing, burning and grazing, feet and feet and feet of topsoil all across the Midwest. Europeans come, hey, it just happens to be that that's the best place to grow crops. So they cleared out the savannas, except on areas that were too steep to plow.
00:14:45
Speaker
Okay, so we live in the driftless area. We didn't get the glaciations that pummeled the rest of the Midwest. So we actually still have topography. We've got hills and valleys, hills and valleys, hills and valleys. So you can plow the tops of the ridges and you can plow the floodplain fields on the bottom. You can't plow these really steep hillsides, right? So we had hundreds of thousands of acres around here of oak savanna up until World War II.
00:15:09
Speaker
Because the settlers grazed those they over grazed them in almost all cases with sheep Okay, because there was a really wool was the the fabric that everyone used it was all clothing was made of wool back in the day World War two came and they turned all the factories that were making the munitions after the war into a
00:15:29
Speaker
plastics and fertilizer, and polyester, which is a byproduct of the petrochemical industry, right? So polyester is really, really cheap to produce. And it has some qualities that are similar. It's not as insulative as wool, but it's lightweight, and it's easy to weave. And so basically, the wool market crashed and never recovered. Since then, since World War II, since the end of World War II, it costs more to shear a sheep than the value of the wool is worth.
00:15:57
Speaker
where it used to be you can have 20 ewes and make a decent little living selling the wool once a year with doing other things, but it like was part of a sustainable livelihood on the land. That all changed after World War Two. So all the sheep vacated the hillsides around here and in many parts of I mean, it was that way up in Vermont was major wool producing area everywhere that market crapped out.
00:16:20
Speaker
all those hillsides that were marginal for conventional crop production or impossible for eventual work continue to be grazed with sheep. Well, that market fell out and all the grazing ceased and all those savannas and grasslands grew up into trees. And so it's those areas, those areas that used to be open grassland that have since gone through succession into woodlands that are high on the list for me to target.
00:16:47
Speaker
to go back to grassland. And so here are some of the reasons why that's actually better than having those forests. Because forests, once you get to your end state of succession, what they call a climax community, are actually fairly low diversity, like biological diversity is fairly low, much fewer birds, because savannas are so complex and so many different types of vegetation, grass,
00:17:11
Speaker
grasses, shrubs, trees, vines, the whole thing, you have maximum biodiversity. Plants, insects, birds, mammals. Highest diversity on oak savannas, much higher than in a closed canopy forest. The other thing is that closed canopy forests don't produce very much food for human beings.
00:17:32
Speaker
So from a human perspective, oak savannas, you get the building materials from the trees, you get the fruit and nuts from the trees, and then you get all of the meat from the herbivores that manage those grasslands. And so oak savannas are kind of like the ultimate human ecosystem. But you mentioned, Emma, carbon sequestration as being a reason to do forests. Well, the funny thing is about carbon sequestration, if you take a fallow farm field,
00:17:59
Speaker
and you just let it go through succession. So 30, 40 years you're up into a closed canopy forest. That 34 years it's accumulating a lot of carbon because it's putting all that carbon in the biomass of the trees. But then the trees start dying and a lot of that carbon oxidizes and it actually goes to a state where the carbon increases from the productivity of the trees is balanced out by the carbon oxidation from the rotting of the trees.
00:18:24
Speaker
So it accumulates a lot of carbon in the short term, but the long term, it goes to a more steady state.
Savannas as Carbon Sinks
00:18:30
Speaker
Grasslands, when managed regeneratively, build topsoil. Like I said, the Native Americans with the tall grass prairies building feet and feet and feet of topsoil, as long as you don't plow that topsoil, flip it over and oxidize the soil organic matter, it's a perennial carbon sequestration. It's a perennial carbon sink. You can accumulate
00:18:51
Speaker
indefinitely carbon in a savanna grassland, regeneratively managed. Super interesting. Also really interesting how much it sounds like the historical context of the place where you are matters in any land management decision, which is something that people don't fully realize the importance of.
00:19:10
Speaker
I'd be curious to hear a bit more about obviously you chose to start farming to use livestock as a tool to kind of restore degraded landscapes. As a result, you need to make that profitable for yourself. How are you managing that? Well, we made a decision early on that farming, you know, selling food that you grow is one of the most difficult ways of making money of any possible way.
00:19:35
Speaker
So when you look at the various ways of, say, marketing or selling, direct to consumer is the one where you can make the most margin. The highest profit is when you're selling direct. So I never even considered an alternative. I never considered wholesale or even restaurant sales.
00:19:53
Speaker
So we built from the ground up using direct to consumer. Madison has one of the largest farmers markets in the country. They're two hours from us. And that market is full of people selling meat. Like farmers markets for our context wasn't going to be a scalable solution. So we started a CSA subscription service where our customers sign up
00:20:19
Speaker
And their credit card gets charged once a month and I provide them with a bundle of their custom choosing mix of beef, pork, lamb, chicken. And we've been doing that for 10 years and it's worked really, really well.
00:20:31
Speaker
Fantastic. Going back to what you said earlier in the introduction, wanting to create a model that is profitable and replicable so that this farm ecosystem can spread to other farms, have you found that there are competitive advantages to having a Savannah ecosystem with the caveat that yours is still even at, let's say 10 years old, a very young Savannah ecosystem, very young?
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's tricky because it depends on how you define competitive advantage, like in what category? If you're just looking at your financials, it costs a lot of money to plant trees, right? And to keep animals from grazing those trees, right? So that's a long term investment.
00:21:17
Speaker
It may be something that future generations take advantage of, so it's hard to say because I don't know and we're a long way from knowing. I think what it does is it provides resilience and it provides diversification in a way that's difficult to quantify and compare.
00:21:38
Speaker
If I was comparing myself to another farm that's just selling say beef and pork like we do, or beef, pork and chicken, there's ways that we do it that aren't near as efficient, right? Because I have all these other objectives. I don't want my cows to browse the like regenerating burrokes. So I got to go put a cage around them, right? That's an expense. It's time. The other guys aren't doing that. They don't care.
00:22:04
Speaker
Right. So like in the short term and short term, maybe being like 20 to 30 years.
00:22:11
Speaker
I'm at a disadvantage because I'm also checking all these other boxes. I'm also integrating all of these other objectives into my operation beyond just the price per pound that I can sell a pound of ground beef for. And so in some ways, we're setting ourselves up at a disadvantage because we have to manage for all of these other objectives at the same time. I think in the long term, it makes a lot of sense. I think it will be a sensible, like I'll be glad that I did it,
00:22:40
Speaker
But in the short term, it's really easy to say like, why am I like, it doesn't make sense to go do all that extra work when we're short on time, we're short on money and all this kind of stuff. And what I mean, for thousands of years, as you said, the Native Americans were managing this system with a long term view. What do you think it is about our current system that prevents that?
Challenges in Long-term Land Management
00:23:04
Speaker
Like, what would it take at a bigger societal level for people to be taking these
00:23:09
Speaker
this long-term view on how to manage their farm ecosystem. Yeah, I don't think there's any short answer to that question. That's a very big question. Obviously one of the main differences was private property rights and the lack of boundaries. So, or at least, I mean, there were boundaries, but there were more like buffer zones. They were like two dimensional boundaries instead of lines.
00:23:36
Speaker
right? So there would be a buffer zone between two tribes managing where they kind of like stayed out of instead of here is a fence and my side is mine and your side is yours, right? Burning is something that's, it's a coarse tool. It's not a fine tool. Like it's one thing for me to like, I have a fence and I mow on my side of the fence, right? And I'm managing the vegetation on my side of the fence. Well, if I'm burning, like I don't know exactly where that fire is going to end.
00:24:01
Speaker
Like I don't know exactly what the boundaries of that burn are going to go. Like I have a rough idea. Like I know I don't want it to go over there and I know it can go over there quite a ways, but it's a very coarse tool to use on the landscape. Whereas we can't manage that way. Like that's just not any kind of possibility. And also back then they had natural herds in the numbers of the millions.
00:24:28
Speaker
millions of animals moving across the landscape. Nobody was designing that. Nobody designed that and said, hey, we're going to have 20 million bison in the northern plains this year and 25 million in the southern plains. It's just the way nature worked. And they set up systems around those things. And we don't have those systems in place like all those ecological systems have broken down. So if we're going to bring them back, it's going to
00:24:54
Speaker
we could have a whole episode just on like the ins and outs of that one question. So I don't know how much how much time you want to spend on that today. But it sounds like it kind of has to happen plot by plot, land parcel by land parcel. And hopefully, like there's ways I'm sure to collaborate with others in your area and whatnot. But the way that we have things set up, we have plots of land that are under certain ownership. And it has to be managed in that way.
00:25:23
Speaker
That's right. And there's ways to play around the boundaries of that with alternative models of land access and community, this and that, like land trust. I mean, there's lots of ways you can play around the boundaries of the current system. But at the end of the day, essentially, yes. I mean, we're talking about parcels with well defined boundaries that we make
00:25:45
Speaker
plans for how to manage it and then bring in appropriate numbers and classes of livestock to then manage the vegetation in those places, hopefully at a profit and for the benefit of the community. Because the other benefit of all this is you're producing meat that is way higher quality than anything that you can buy in a store. The most expensive steak you can get at Whole Foods like Tails in comparison to like the kind of meat that these systems throw off as a byproduct.
00:26:14
Speaker
So going back to those systems and like, let's say profitability in particular, when we work with our silver pasture clients, we are talking about that these systems will be more profitable for them because of shade in particular. And shades is the number one driving force for when we are working with our clients. And then also like later on reduction in feed costs. Do you see that you're seeing any kind of those benefits yet in your system?
00:26:42
Speaker
Not yet. My systems are still young, like the big time tree plantings that we've done are not producing yet. And so like my big tree, silvopasture plantings, I've geared more towards the production of food for hogs, because hogs are omnivores and we got to feed them a lot of grain.
00:27:00
Speaker
And that's a huge expense. And ecologically, it's not something I want to be doing. So for me, the bigger bang for the buck is to be able to supplement their food versus cows, they just eat what's out there. So the marginal value of the silvopasture expenses are much higher for me for hogs than it is for cattle. And also, I said that we have half of our farm is 100 acres, or
00:27:26
Speaker
120 acres that's just wide open and in some areas that is but we actually do relative to a lot of other places have quite a bit of natural regeneration happening so I do have ash trees and elm trees and maple trees out on my pastures so I do have shade
00:27:44
Speaker
the marginal value for me planting trees in the pasture for cattle in particular is much lower and not even I do it for fun here and there and it's not even so much for the cattle. It's just like I like oak trees. So I want to have a few more oak trees scattered around. I mean, I know there are benefits, but like I've got a lot like shade isn't a problem. And so anyway, yeah, I focus more in areas for hogs where you know, it's like mulberries and
00:28:10
Speaker
hazelnuts and walnuts and acorns that I can really optimize the fruit and nut production for their benefit as opposed to the herbivores.
00:28:21
Speaker
And over time, you have a competitive advantage there compared to someone who's just raising their hogs on pasture. And the amount of feed that they're supplementing with the forages is really minimal. They're still feeding the same amount of grain as someone in a CAFO, whereas you're able to, one, reduce feed input, but then two, also have a differentiated product. And you can go to the store and say, I've got
00:28:43
Speaker
walnut finished, mulberry finished hog. And you could at some point say this is corn free, soy free, organic, because you can justify a smaller amount of feed because you are supplementing with so much mass that's coming off of these trees. That's right. Yep. Makes complete sense. I love it.
00:29:01
Speaker
So Austin has now had his one trick question. He's allowed to have one trick question. But on that subject, though, what has it been? Obviously, you're growing an extremely high quality nutrient dense product that you're selling at a higher price point than you know, what you can get in a traditional supermarket. What has it been like educating your consumers about that? And what are maybe some of the misconceptions they might have? Well,
00:29:30
Speaker
That's something that's kind of changed a little bit. I think over the last five to 10 years, when we first started, it was a lot of, you can say more politically left environmental type folks that wanted to get good quality meat.
00:29:47
Speaker
But in those communities right now, meat is kind of like frowned upon. And so I actually have lost quite a few of the customers because they want to go plant-based because they are feeling guilted into that decision. And a lot of our new customers are like people who are concerned about like vaccination. I've gotten several new customers lately who are like their number one consideration is like, are we giving RNA shots to our cows?
00:30:13
Speaker
So like the people that are looking for local food may be sort of like the demographics are changing a little bit and so therefore the education is maybe a little bit different. You know what I've found is the education most needed, people at a gut level know that the meat that they're eating
00:30:34
Speaker
conventionally is terrible, right? Like I don't have to educate people that KFO meat is bad. And obviously like regenerative is better, right? So I think that's pretty easy. What's been more difficult is like people aren't cooking anymore. So like, people don't know how to cook a chuck roast or short ribs.
00:30:56
Speaker
So if we're going to like eat a whole animal and not just eat ground beef, people need their hands held a little bit on like how to prepare those things so that they're good. So we do a lot of like recipes and giving customers ideas every month on how to prepare certain cuts because the level of cooking education I think is way down from where it used to be, especially with regards to meat. A lot of young people just don't know how to cook meat at all.
00:31:26
Speaker
And so that's been one of the biggest educational like roadblocks is just how do you cook all of the pieces of meat that come off of a cow or off of a pig?
00:31:37
Speaker
I want to ask you this question because I think you'll give a really good answer. For all the leftist people that are being guilted out of eating cows, and I do still, among a lot of even friends I have, hear people that still think that cows are bad for the planet, could you give us a quick explanation of why that's not true?
00:31:59
Speaker
I could give you many explanations for why that's not true, but I'll try to just stick with one or two. Like one, there's like the environmental question, right? And then there's like the human health question. Those are separate questions, but they're related. So we'll start with the environmental. Food comes from the land, whether it's a soybean or a peanut or a beef steak, right? A ribeye.
00:32:24
Speaker
It's all coming from the land. So what kind of land is it coming from? If you're eating a diet, like if you're not eating meat, that's fine. You're going to be eating a diet that's fairly heavy in grain and legumes, which are grown in tilled fields.
00:32:41
Speaker
where all of the life is removed so that one plant can grow there. All the soil microorganisms are destroyed, all the rodents, all the birds, all the insects, all the plants completely, you completely eliminate all life in one place except for one plant that you're allowing to grow.
00:33:01
Speaker
Okay, so it's it's an eco side you are Removing an ecosystem that used to be there that was full of life when you have a cow now if you've got cows that are in a CAFO and they're eating corn and
00:33:17
Speaker
it's coming from the land and I was vegetarian for 10 years going through college. Grass fed beef wasn't a thing. The only option for meat was CAFO meat and I was like, I'm not doing that. And in CAFO situation, it takes six to 10 times as much land to grow the corn to feed the cow as it does to just eat the corn and beans. And in that case, eat the corn and beans, it's way better for the land.
00:33:41
Speaker
But if you have the option of regeneratively raised grass-fed beef, it's grazing inside an intact ecosystem alongside hundreds of species of plants, hundreds of species of insects, millions of species of soil biology, birds. We have rare grassland birds in our tall grass prairie that I restored. I mean, we've got massive biodiversity in an intact ecosystem that's providing ecosystem services.
00:34:08
Speaker
It's filtering groundwater, it's sequestering carbon, it's building topsoil, and it's providing habitat for all of these plants and animals. And so there's no question ecologically, at least from a protein, like if you want to compare protein sources like grass-fed beef versus conventional beef versus legumes eating beans for protein for plants, beans are better than KFO beef by a little bit.
00:34:31
Speaker
by a little bit. Grass-fed beef is better than either by a lot. Because in the other two systems, both of them require ecocide. Both of them require completely bulldozing all ecology in order for one legume plant to grow. Whereas the grass-fed beef, because of the beef being there, because of the way they graze, they provide all of this habitat. I almost stepped just two days ago, I'm out in my pasture fixing some fence, and I almost stepped on a fawn.
00:35:00
Speaker
I mean, it had just been born. It was about two palm widths of my hand, tiny little thing. They're there because we're grazing that way. So that's the ecological piece.
Ecological Benefits of Grass-fed Beef
00:35:12
Speaker
And then from a human health perspective, the nutrient density, like the nutrient quality of grass fed beef versus even an organically grown legume is off the charts. I mean, there's no comparison at all. So yeah, it only makes sense.
00:35:28
Speaker
It's one of the most troubling misconceptions that the public has. I was reading just today also that just since 2017, we've lost every single year 20,000 ranchers and so 120,000 total. And since just 2017, we've lost 8% of the total cattle population in the US.
00:35:51
Speaker
So it's pretty striking numbers. And I think people are still eating as much beef, but it's being imported from... It's being imported. If they're eating a lot of the grass fed beef, a majority of the grass fed beef is being imported from Australia, New Zealand. And then the corn finished beef is being imported largely from Brazil, Argentina, China, in some circumstances. So
00:36:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's, I mean, our area, we're in the dairy state, we had the highest concentration of small dairy farms of anywhere in the world. And just in the last 10 years, it's just, it's just night and day difference the landscape like those dairies are gone. And large grain farms have bought up and are renting out all those fields and no longer do you see the contour strips of alfalfa by the dairies. Now it's just all corn and beans. It's sad. It's really, really sad.
00:36:42
Speaker
So I'm curious with those challenges that you've seen, if you've noticed any good models, any successful, maybe scalable models of getting people on the land, and particularly in these long-term perennial ecosystems that really need long-term stewardship. We're not talking about here about
00:37:01
Speaker
someone being able to access land for corn and beans farming for a couple years. And if it doesn't go beyond that, that's fine. But really having long-term secure access to the land to be able to make these kind of investments that take many, many years in order to repay themselves.
00:37:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think this model that we've kind of pioneered of the subscription based CSA for meat, we've helped many dozens of other farms do this. And over the years, and those are the farms that are still there, making it work.
00:37:34
Speaker
So that doesn't answer the question about land access. How do you get on land? That's a separate thing. Once you're on the land and you have secure tenure, how do you cash flow an enterprise that's profitable? We've kind of figured that one out, but the land access is a completely different question and has a completely different answer. And I, I don't think there is one answer for that one.
00:38:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's a tough one. As we all know, the value of land, the price of land is out of whack with what you could reasonably expect to make farming. So unless you come in with some sort of outside capital, it's really impossible to justify purchasing the land.
00:38:19
Speaker
Well, and so you spend a lot of time mentoring people that want to go into farming. I'd be curious to hear what you would give as advice to someone who wants to support us moving towards a better food system. Like what can they do, maybe beyond just buying from you or from a farmer in their community?
00:38:37
Speaker
Well, I mean, you kind of dismissed buying as if that's trivial. And the fact is, is that even people who are 100% supportive of this, they're not getting a majority of their calories from farms like this. They're just not. Okay. And so until that happens, that's the building block for the whole regenerative future is like eating regeneratively. And I see so many people that talk the talk,
00:39:04
Speaker
But at the end of the day, they're going to a restaurant and ordering whatever that's coming off the Cisco truck being trucked from Mexico. Okay, that's not going to cut it. We've all got to do our part. Each one of us eats three meals a day. Over your lifetime, the decisions that you make three meals a day is going to affect 40 to 100 acres of land.
00:39:28
Speaker
I was at a bar once telling somebody what I was doing. He was like, Well, I don't have 100 acres. I can't do any restoration. I'm like, Are you kidding? You eat three meals a day. That equals 100 acres over your lifetime of land that you are 100% responsible for determining what happens there.
00:39:44
Speaker
You don't have to be the one driving the tractor or moving the cows to be able to say like on my abstract hundred acres that I'm going to decide on what to do over my lifetime, I want regenerative grass-fed beef and not a CAFO. We all have the power to do that, right? So that's not a trivial thing like just buying because a lot most people don't do it.
00:40:05
Speaker
So let's start there. Let's just get on that same page, start eating our food, like the vast majority of our calories from farms that are doing the right thing, right? Once we do that, then we can start building additional elements of the regenerative economy, which everything needs to be redone differently, right? We need a fiber shed, like we need to be growing, we need to be producing our own clothes. So we need to have sheep on the landscape, we need to be growing
00:40:33
Speaker
flax and hemp, and maybe cotton too. There's so many elements that need to be changed. But I think we've got to start with securing the land first. And the way we secure the land is through what we eat. And so it actually is a big deal how much of an impact each one of our dietary decisions makes over the long term. So I think we got to start there. Once we start once we get that,
00:40:55
Speaker
It just depends on your context and what your skills are and what your access to resources are. I mean, there's, there's going to be room for like nonprofits to do work with donation money. There's going to be room for entrepreneurs to build new products. I mean, like our property has so much natural resources. I've got in my head, 20 enterprises that I a hundred percent know are profitable and worth doing, but I only have so many hours in a day.
00:41:23
Speaker
So far, we've got four kids. I could have 20. I need 20 kids to be able to take on all of these enterprises. I don't think I can convince my wife to go that far. We can have a few, but the land produces super abundantly. And that is the silver lining of all of this, is that once you start managing the ecosystem,
00:41:44
Speaker
There's no shortage of possibilities for producing food. I mean, we could integrate aquaculture into our systems and produce twice as much protein off the same amount of land by integrating fish production. We have two big springs that produce hundreds of gallons a minute of fresh
00:42:03
Speaker
clean water coming straight out of the ground. We could have trout. We could have a lot of stuff. When you start getting people on the land figuring things out, there's theoretically some limit of how much you can produce, but it is extremely high.
00:42:18
Speaker
We are not in any way limited by land for food production and for the ability to do what we need. So, you know, we materials in our area, it's wood. We have just a super abundance of trees that we're clearing out of our systems, right? So let's do something with that wood. One of the things we do here is grow mushrooms on mushroom logs. We have a sawmill and we mill wood for building materials.
00:42:43
Speaker
All of those things are like tertiary, secondary tertiary, quaternary enterprises that can be stacked on to any existing regenerative farm enterprise. Like I said, I think we got to start with food. I think that's the basis of the pyramid. And then we start building up from there, fiber, building materials, medicines. That's another thing we produce here at a homestead scale for our family. But
00:43:08
Speaker
The world needs more like real medicine. We don't need more big pharma. We need more like real medicine from plants that we can grow in our backyards. It's not that hard. We just got to do it. And so there's just thousands and thousands of things that need to be done on the land. So the question is how to get started, right? And how to get land from like where it is now.
00:43:30
Speaker
And then there's this like utopian future vision, but like how to get it from where it is now to something that's just an inch closer to that vision, right? And I think that's the big hurdle to cross. Once we cross that hurdle, then everything else just plays out. It all makes sense. Like once you get started with this whole regenerative land management, everything makes sense. Like you can see how life should be lived.
00:43:54
Speaker
how materials should be managed and where things should come from. It all just fits in. Ecosystems provide everything that we need once we have those ecosystems. So it's just getting the land set aside and moving down that pathway. That's the hard part.
00:44:09
Speaker
So would you say that people that are coming into agriculture want to get into agriculture come from an urban suburban background don't have a farm to start with and price of land as it is makes it really hard to get onto the land. Would you say that a lot more people should look into those secondary tertiary
00:44:27
Speaker
opportunities on farms where those opportunities are just not being made use of. Even if you decide to go out and buy your own farm, at least consider and look at the opportunities and possibilities for making better use of the existing farmland that is out there, the farms where you might have a connection and be able to get on and provide a service or another product off of that land. Would you say that that would be
00:44:52
Speaker
kind of maybe an undervalued step or an undervalued consideration for people today. I think so. It's more of like a both end, right? That's one potential pathway in. I do think we're in a position, you know, if I were to look at things from like 30,000 foot view, the most important thing is is just locking down more parcels of land, more so than developing existing ones, because that can happen infinitely into the future. But I do think it's a way to get started, like start a mushroom enterprise on somebody's farm.
00:45:21
Speaker
start logging or some kind of wood production. Lots of farmers have wood lots that they don't have the time to efficiently manage. There's tons of ways, but I think what we really need to figure out is how to get more land under this kind of production so that we get to the point where then we start to develop each of those farms into the secondary tertiary quantity, into these ecosystems of enterprises, which is going to require
00:45:48
Speaker
different ways of organizing socially than we're really good at right now. That's a really difficult problem to solve just socially, not to mention like economically how that all works. Like, are you on my farm? Or is it our farm? Like, there's just so many challenges to those systems, which are challenges we need to like confront and work out. And I think that's a good way for some people to like, get started on the land is either
00:46:13
Speaker
on our farm, there's so many things we could be doing. If somebody, like I would love to have turkeys here and sell turkeys and I've got a market to sell turkeys, I just don't have the time to raise turkeys. And my kids aren't old enough to do it on their own. So if somebody came here and said, hey, can I set up a turkey operation? We've actually had people do that. A couple came here six, seven years ago and they started a turkey operation and they raised like a hundred turkeys and we helped them sell them through our markets. And it was like a win-win for everyone. Those kinds of things, I think are great ways to get started. And then you take the next step to access some land somewhere.
00:46:43
Speaker
Again, put some numbers on the magnitude of the land issue. There's 900 million acres of farmland or ranch in the United States. Less than 1% is organic for whatever that even means. And 300 million of that is expected to change hands over the next 10 years because of the aging farming population. So who gets access to it in the next 10 years is going to determine
00:47:11
Speaker
how it's stewarded for the next half century. So it's really, I would say, a huge issue that's staring us down. So obviously, you went into farming because you're motivated about restoring degraded landscapes. I think we all agree that we're facing some sort of ecological collapse in some sense.
Critique of Climate Change Focus on Carbon
00:47:30
Speaker
But I'd be curious to hear your perspective on climate change, and particularly how it's understood by the general public.
00:47:40
Speaker
Sure, yeah, I think, you know, it's actually been kind of disappointing in the last 10 or so years where climate change has really taken on. It's like all these efforts that were focused on environmental issues, many of them locally, like Save the Local River or Stream or Mountaintop, have all gotten subsumed into this focus on climate, which isn't something that you can see or touch or feel or like gaze at with beauty or have any agency, but it's really disempowering.
00:48:07
Speaker
And so that's an element that really bothers me about the climate change movement is that we've lost connection to place and fighting for place. We're fighting this monolith in the abstract up in the sky. It's almost like religion. It's like a god up in the sky that we're trying to appease. And I think that's disempowering for local people on the ground trying to do good things. But I also think that it's really short-sighted in the focus on carbon.
00:48:34
Speaker
As if the whole climate has one thermostat and it's the parts per million of climate in the atmosphere and that nothing else matters. Like I don't think we should be out there polluting.
00:48:45
Speaker
and just willy-nilly burning carbon, and we should all drive Suburbans. But I do think that the climate is a complex system, and one of the biggest inputs into that system is the sun. Carbon is one of the elements, but pretending like it's a singular, like we have this lever, that we can just pull this lever and it's going to go up or down is ridiculous for a complex system. The other thing is that right now,
00:49:13
Speaker
We are in the middle of a magnetic pull shift.
00:49:17
Speaker
Solar system-wide, every planet, their magnetic fields, if they have one, is dropping and those fields are shifting. And the magnetic shield around planet Earth, our magnetosphere, is what protects us from cosmic radiation, radiation from the sun and radiation from the galactic center. And that's declining at an exponential rate right now. It has been for the last 100 years, but it's declining at an exponential rate. And at the same time, we're learning all of the mechanisms
00:49:43
Speaker
that the electromagnetic circuit of our solar system plays on the development of climate systems. Clouds, earthquakes, volcanoes, all these things are, and the storm system, the jet stream, all these things are affected by the electromagnetic atmosphere of our planet, right? And that's changing right now.
00:50:02
Speaker
So we're seeing all this climate disruption and all of the normal patterns are kind of going out the window. We're seeing flooding and droughts and extreme this and that lockstep with this pole shift exactly as you would expect with the pole shift. And we're all running around pointing our fingers at carbon.
00:50:19
Speaker
to me, it's just kind of an absurd proposition that we should be worried about this one thing. Now, I say that as somebody who as like for my living, I sequester carbon, I've sequestered hundreds of 1000s of tons of carbon through the process of building soils with animals, right? So I'm vested in the process of sequestering carbon. So like, I'm on the same page, we all want the same things. But what I think we should be focusing on instead
00:50:46
Speaker
of singularly focusing on carbon. Because here's a problem. We talked about, Emma asked me about how do you make an argument for grass fed beef versus being vegetarian or whatever. If you collapse, and I made this whole argument about the ecology, right? If you collapse everything down to carbon, then you actually can make a pretty good case to completely get rid of all animals.
00:51:09
Speaker
Just rid animals apply. They breathe. They burp. All humans breathe and burp. You can make an argument to completely remove all animals from planet Earth if all you're looking for is carbon. Now, if you look at ecosystems, you see like, well, cows that are grazing on pastures. Well, there's methanotropic bacteria in the pastures and they eat methane.
00:51:30
Speaker
they gobble it up, right? So now all of a sudden, your equations don't work. Well, that's a different story. But the problem is that singular focus on climate or on carbon as a mechanism for climate. So if we step back a little bit and say, like, well, let's not just look at carbon, let's look at functioning ecosystems that are building soil
00:51:49
Speaker
creating habitat for biodiversity and providing goods and services for human beings. Like that's something I feel like doesn't matter what your politics are. It doesn't matter who you are. Like we can all agree that that is a good thing. But when you go to carbon, you've got half of America that's going to write you off immediately because
00:52:09
Speaker
it's a conspiracy, right? Like carbon, they're just trying to control the elites are trying to control all the sheeple with carbon taxes or whatever the the latest thing is,
Advocating for Ecosystem Restoration Over Carbon Metrics
00:52:19
Speaker
right? So that's not going to get everybody on the same page. If we focus on functional ecosystems,
00:52:25
Speaker
that produce high-quality food for human beings and is building soil as an investment in the future generations of humanity. That's something that literally every single person on planet Earth that's actually a human being will get behind.
00:52:41
Speaker
And that's where I think we need to be focusing our environmental conservation work on that, on building ecosystems for people rather than just singly focusing on carbon emissions, which I think brings you into pretty dangerous territory.
00:52:57
Speaker
And those ecosystems that you're building, the perennial ecosystems with trees, shrubs, forages, livestock, multiple types of livestock, those are inherently resilient ecosystems, comparatively to annual agriculture and tillage and all that that's required there. So you're creating resilience to whatever comes our way.
00:53:19
Speaker
Exactly. And here I'll leave you with one little factoid. Okay. In 1500, right around the time of Columbus and all that, there was something around 60 million bison in North America. Okay, right now there's around 70 million cows.
00:53:36
Speaker
bison are 25-30% bigger than a cow. There was more meat produced in the United States in 1500 than there is in 2024. More beef, buffalo meat, produced. And that doesn't include elk,
00:53:53
Speaker
or deer, which were also here in the numbers of the tens to hundreds of millions that were also utilized for meat. There was more meat here in North America 500 years ago than there is today. And there was no corn. There was no Roundup. There was no irrigation. There was just human beings on the landscape managing for the production of grass and trees. And there's no reason why we can't produce all of that again
00:54:23
Speaker
here in North America. There's really no reason except cultural, societal, all that kind of stuff. But just from a purely practical, physical standpoint, we have a model that works. Peter, I greatly appreciate the depth of ecological and historical knowledge that you have and are able to share and then also integrate that with regenerative agriculture and not just say regenerative agriculture as a buzzword, but like deeply let's push the envelope as far as we can.
00:54:53
Speaker
So I really appreciate that and appreciate you taking the time to share that. Yeah, my pleasure. Yeah, thank you so much.
00:55:01
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. 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.