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EP03 Jacob Wolki
104 Plays1 year ago
Jake Wolki is a regenerative farmer, butchery and cafe owner based in Albury, NSW.
Inspired by thought leaders like Joel Salatin and Allan Savory, Jake takes us through the values that underpin his business and lifestyle
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Transcript
Introduction of guest Jake Walke
00:00:00
Speaker
G'day everyone. Welcome back to episode three. My name is Nick Tasky and today I'm joined by Jake Walke, a regenerative farmer based in Albury, New South Wales. Thanks for joining us. Happy to be here, Nick. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
00:00:17
Speaker
Oh, there's a bit, there's a bit going on, I guess. Uh, my name's Jake Walkey married. I've got, I've got two sons that are five and two. I'm expecting my third child in about two months. I've always wanted a big family and a little bit daunting for my wife. I guess when we were dating, but now she's gone through three pregnancies and she's a proven breeder. So very happy with my choice there.
Jake's journey into regenerative farming
00:00:46
Speaker
I own a bicycle shop in a cafe in partnership with my parents that I've had since 2011. In 2019, I took an interest in organic farming, growing organic veggies in my backyard, trying to address some
00:01:05
Speaker
health issues that I had, which took me down the rabbit hole of sourcing grass-fed beef and other things. And I wasn't really satisfied with, I guess, the integrity of the food that I could source locally and easily. So I thought I'll grow up myself. And my family had a hundred acre farm close to town here. So I hit my parents up and I said, can I lease that block of land and move some cows around and chase them with some chickens? And they said, go for it.
00:01:35
Speaker
And I did end of 2020, my wife and I purchased a butchery here in town and renovated and took our protein processing under our own roof because we found that was the biggest bottleneck for our farm business was to get meat processed. It was slow and expensive and subpar outsourcing that.
00:02:02
Speaker
And now we do that internally and we custom process for 15 local farmers.
Vertical integration challenges in farming
00:02:06
Speaker
On our farm, we do beef, pork, chicken, lamb, eggs, honey, and we breed dogs for the pet market from imported bloodlines. Very cool. That's a pretty diverse operation you got going on there and vertically integrated by the sounds of it. A little bit. It's not vertically integrated by choice. Vertical integration sounds like the sexiest thing since sliced bread, but when you're a part of it,
00:02:31
Speaker
It is fragile. I'm not convinced that it makes you more robust. Sure, it takes you out of the whims and decision making of others, but it also makes each part of your enterprise
00:02:47
Speaker
wholly reliant on another part of your own enterprise. So an example of that is our cafe restaurant that trades inside of our bicycle shop, which is a seven day a week breakfast, lunch venue uses all of our protein from the farm. So eggs, bacon, chicken, lamb, honey, all of that comes straight from the farm. And when COVID lockdown started, the abattoir that we use said they didn't want to do any private kills anymore.
00:03:15
Speaker
So my farm revenue stopped because I couldn't process anything. My butchers had no work to do because I couldn't get animals butchered and my cafe had no stock because my butchers couldn't do anything. So although we were, I guess, 75% of the way to complete vertical integration, the whole thing stopped. So it actually adds a layer of complexity and fragility to the business in a way. So, you know, we are trending towards more integration.
00:03:47
Speaker
I'm going to be a little bit of a hypocrite about what I just said. We are working towards having our own abattoir in the future, but I don't think it's as easy and rosy as it looks from the outside.
Jake's farming beginnings and community impact
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, no, I can't imagine this. Can you speak on how many animals you're running in your operation as far as, I know you said you do cattle, pork, you do chickens. Sure. Well, firstly, what did you start off with?
00:04:17
Speaker
Well, the first thing I did when I took over dad's block was I got 20 heifers, Hereford heifers, not for breeding, just for fattening. It was a very cheap market back in 2019 and a heifer wasn't worth much more than a steer and that was a good buy. And then I bought a caravan on Facebook.
00:04:36
Speaker
and ripped a baler straw apart inside of it and tech screwed a dozen milk crates to the wall as nesting boxes and put 40 chooks in it that I flogged out of my dad's little shed that he was growing with his own, laying his own eggs in. And so I started moving those 20 heifers around with some poly braid and a portable trough and bucketing water and just doing absolutely everything the hardest way possible.
00:05:00
Speaker
and then towing it around with a borrowed vehicle. I'd have to go out there and beg my dad to borrow his ute so I could move these chooks around behind the cows. So that's really what we started with, a small beef enterprise, and the idea of that was just to grow beef.
00:05:14
Speaker
for myself and my growing family, there was never to sell beef. And the chooks behind that was just to try and be involved in the romantic aspect of mixed enterprise farming that guys like Joel Salatin spook and download onto the hearts of young men like myself. So it was never intended to be a business. It was just
00:05:35
Speaker
about shoring up my family's access to good food. But as I got through that, I thought, you know, I'm doing all this work moving these cows every day and they look brilliant. The pasture is doing really well. The chickens are laying great eggs. And if I've got all these cows moving every day under the same program, but I can only eat one of them, maybe I could sell
00:05:55
Speaker
one to a family member or a neighbor or a friend. So I absolutely went to town guilt tripping every single person I knew trying to trick them into buying some meat for me. And it just so happened that they were incredible cows and we had a great season and they all finished beautifully. And I had a lot of
00:06:12
Speaker
uh good grace ahead of me and and it helped build a little bit of a reputation that possibly I knew what I was doing and it gave me a leg in to buy my next lot of cattle and and off we went but yeah I started with a small herd of cattle and a small flock of chickens in regards to the numbers that we've got now at the moment on our farm we've got
00:06:33
Speaker
Across, we've got three lease blocks of 40 hectares each. So we're all up, it's about 300 acres for those working in old-fashioned archaic obsolete measurement systems. And I've got about, I don't know, 80 cows that we're breeding, plus all their progeny and bulls and everything on top of that. And I've got about 70 ewes that have just started lambing. This is my first time mucking around with sheep.
00:07:01
Speaker
And I'm incredibly bullish about the future of sheep. The economics and the life cycle is just exceptionally accelerated compared to beef. And it's so exciting being involved in saying that move so quick. Beef is almost like a bit of a, I'm always looking at it like it's a bit of a gentleman's hobby now because it's so slow compared to other livestock.
00:07:24
Speaker
At the moment, I've got 3,000 broilers on my farm, so they're meat chickens. Their life cycle's about six to seven weeks, so we're processing about 250 to 350 a week. I've got 80 pigs on the farm. We're on track to do almost 400 pigs in the next 12 months.
00:07:48
Speaker
got about 30 beehives, 1200 laying hens that are giving us eggs every day.
Influence of Joel Salatin on Jake's farming philosophy
00:07:55
Speaker
And I think I've touched on everything there. Yeah, cool. So that sounds like a fair bit to get your head around to begin with.
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, if you don't have a background in agriculture, like I didn't, you probably wouldn't want to start there. But in terms of daily chores, managing those animals, when you're starting in your enterprise and building your infrastructure and building your knowledge base,
00:08:22
Speaker
It's tumultuous and takes a bit of time, but all those enterprises that I just rattled off could easily be looked after in terms of day-to-day chores in 20 hours a week. No problems at all. It's actually when you have an issue like the pump breaks,
00:08:41
Speaker
or you have a storm and fast winds, that's when you need to put in a few extra hours and see what you're made of. But in terms of just day-to-day rinse and repeat, feed these ones, move these ones, that's all quite simple. We spend most of our time sitting behind the wheel driving to the abattoir, driving to the butchery, driving to the customer's house to drop the meat off. Sometimes I feel like we're celebrated couriers. Yeah, right.
00:09:07
Speaker
That's pretty funny. So tell me a little bit about the inspiration to begin. I know you mentioned the name Joel Salatin. Was that something you just, you watched like Food Inc or you saw him talk on the Joe Rogan experience or something like that and you were like, Hey, I'm, I'm inspired to do this. When my wife was pregnant with our first son Otto, who's almost six, he was born in 2017.
00:09:30
Speaker
I got right into organic gardening. So when you have your first child, like for me, my life sort of changed. I didn't want to be out with mates so much. I wanted to be home with my wife and my child. And I was trying to find things that I could turn my hand at home. And I live in town, all my farmlands lease. So I don't have a background living on farms.
00:09:48
Speaker
And I didn't have a workshop to go into. I didn't have a paddock to go toil in. And I didn't want to sit at home playing Xbox and picking my nose. So I went out the back and started gardening. And I got right into no-till organic gardening. And the place that I got a lot of my information from was YouTube.
00:10:09
Speaker
I spent quite a lot of time following different vloggers on YouTube. And one gentleman was Justin Rhodes, who's got a beautiful channel where he shares media of his family's journey through homesteading and homeschooling and organic farming. And I was watching one of his farming videos with a gardener called Paul Gauci, who does this beautiful type of orchard gardening called Back to Eden.
00:10:38
Speaker
farming and a little thumbnail popped up on the side with the suggested videos list and the thumbnail said on it this man buys land for $30 an acre and I knew it was clickbait like you read that and you know it's clickbait but being the businessman that I am I couldn't
00:10:55
Speaker
not click on it. The value proposition was potentially too high. So I clicked on that. And that was, of course, Justin Rhodes doing a vlog visiting Joel Salatin from Polyface Farms property in Virginia there in America. And the $30 an acre was Joel talking about how with $30 worth of infrastructure per acre, he can double that land's productivity. So essentially, he's buying an acre for $30.
00:11:24
Speaker
And I watched that and I hadn't thought at all about growing protein or eggs or anything like that. And I was just completely captured by Joel's optimism and romanticism around agriculture. And I just did a deep dive and very quickly decided that that's something that I wanted to try and be a part of. So, yeah, that's, you know, it started with Polyface Farm for me, really.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, very cool. He is a very inspiring guy. And he's like, he's kind of romanticizes everything. And I think that's probably a lot of the reason for his success is that he's so inspiring and so passionate about what he does. He's a cool guy. Have you ever seen him speak in real life or taken any of his courses?
00:12:13
Speaker
I haven't done any of his formal courses. I'm not sure what he offers there, but I've met him twice with a couple Aussie tours that he did. I enjoyed getting to hear him speak one time. The first time I met him, Taranaki Farm in Victoria here in Australia, I had a two-day workshop with him, which I guess is a course. I went and did that. I don't know.
00:12:36
Speaker
20 people there that did that course and I just was on cloud nine. Just thought it was so much fun. Just wanted, I had a couple, I think right at that stage, I just bought my first flock of 300 hens and I was starting to lay eggs for our cafe. It was maybe early 2020, right at the start of our journey.
00:12:54
Speaker
And then a few months later, he was back in Australia in a local worm farm, actually just around the corner from me, had him come in and speak at a summit. And I got to meet him there and, you know, shake his hand again, which was a real, real blast for me. It was like, if you're a Rockstar fan and you get to meet Gene Simmons, you know, I just thought, how cool is this? Joel Salatin's right in my hometown.
00:13:15
Speaker
And part of the allure for me with Mr. Salatin is not just his farming aspect, but I love his family values. I love his thoughts on homeschooling. I love that he's a faith-based farmer. I really feel like I connected with him on so many different levels. And I think that's why it resonated so strongly for me and why I just had to jump in.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's a real meaning behind what Salatin does beyond just, you know, making profits or selling what he does. It's like he's trying to change the world, which I think is very inspiring.
Organic certification and regenerative agriculture principles
00:13:50
Speaker
Yeah. And I like the fact that he doesn't hide behind his desire for profits. You know, you're not going to change the world going broke. So, um, you know, we've got five tenants of production on our farm, five pillars of production and our fifth and we sort of reference them in sequence and pillar number five.
00:14:08
Speaker
is be profitable. We wanna get paid, we wanna have a good life and I wanna scale my enterprise. I think one of the things that is sort of burgeoning on regenerative agriculture is this poverty communist mindset that everybody needs to be as micro as they possibly can and sort of be these starving artists because if you don't, your heart's in the wrong place and your virtue is no good. And I just think it's toxic.
00:14:38
Speaker
revenue I can produce, if I can maintain my farm's integrity by proxy, the more people I've accessed a fantastic healing food and the more animals and landscapes that can be liberated. So we've got absolutely no intention of pulling on the handbrake out of virtue. We're the opposite. We want to scale as hard as we can so that we can get animals out of sheds and landscapes restored. Yeah.
00:15:05
Speaker
So a little bit because I think my experience with organic farming when I worked in commercial agriculture, I think this is a lot of people's understanding of what organic agriculture is. They think it's taking a fellow field or taking the crop that you're currently growing and you're starting to apply
00:15:27
Speaker
organic imports and so instead of putting NPK fertilizer, you're putting cow manure or you're putting something certified organic on there. Instead of spraying with any kind of chemical that you can think of, whether it be roundups, one of the most popular ones or whatever you can think, the common idea is that you exchange that for a certified organic pesticide or herbicide or fungicide or whatever it is.
00:15:54
Speaker
That is not the way regenerative farming works in my understanding. So could you elaborate a little bit on exactly what style of farming you're using and how it differs from conventional farming?
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I refer to us as organic farmers, but we're not certified organic. I'm not certified anything. I don't care for any bureaucracy to come on to my property and audit me and give me a stamp. It's just not something I'm interested in being involved in. I've been offered plenty of certifications, want to come and get amongst it, and I'm not concerned at all. Organic for me,
00:16:34
Speaker
is just the status quo from 100 years ago. It's not using oil as a cover crop, basically. And like you said, for me, it's not swapping out cow manure being spread out on pasture versus super. What I'd like to do is have the cow on pasture spreading manure in terms of something intensive.
00:17:04
Speaker
You know for me organic farming or regenerative agriculture like it doesn't have to be a real dog dog magic in the industry sort of is in a bit of turmoil everyone's in fighting on these facebook groups what what is what is your definition of regenerative agriculture to me it's real simple are you regenerating the commons.
00:17:22
Speaker
or are you not? So our common resources are generally referred to as things like water quality and air quality and our shared forests and woodlands. But I'd like to push the envelope a little bit further and saying common resources should also be the health of our soil and the fertility of our soil and also the health and wealth of our community. Because if our community isn't healthy and wealthy, we all suffer. If you live in a poor community, it becomes
00:17:51
Speaker
potentially.
00:17:53
Speaker
poverty-stricken, crime can escalate, relationships and family units deteriorate, your personal health and where you're at in your own journey is not what it could be. So I think when we're looking at regenerative agriculture, and when I give lectures and talks, regenerative agriculture for me is a style of farming that increases the commons being air, water, soil, community, health and wealth.
00:18:22
Speaker
without it being at the cost of someone else so we don't want to have to extract minerals out of the mind in the Congo to put on our soil so that we can have another good year when we could just harness our production models here and move our animals a little bit differently and integrate another species and have a different mindset about what a weed potentially is.
00:18:42
Speaker
We've got weeds on our farm, things like stinging nettle. I'm so upset because with our grazing management, we've got rid of them, but I know my cows love eating them. I'm trying to figure out how I can bring them back into my pasture because my cows like them, but we've managed to graze them out of our pasture with our rotational methods. It's also a little bit about changing your mindset as to what your goals in agriculture are. We have the odd fissile come up.
00:19:12
Speaker
Is it a problem? Like when we put our cattle in their cell for the day, they eat it. So why would I get upset about that thistle existing if it's putting kilograms on my cows? Yeah, that's a very good point you make. And I think this is something that Max Galane and I discussed in the last podcast that I did. And just going back to the difference between regenerative farming and conventional farming is I see it as
00:19:41
Speaker
They're two totally different things. What I currently do now is health coaching and I like to use the analogy of building the soil or creating compost.
00:19:52
Speaker
You can put your eggshells and your coffee grounds and your food scraps in a compost bin and you can, you know, shut that compost bin or bear it in the ground and, you know, come back the next day. And there's not going to be any compost there. It takes time. It takes heat. It takes energy. It takes the bacteria and all the other things that you add to it to create that compost. And what a lot of people, or I think what has
00:20:21
Speaker
Maybe an ideology that has spread with organic certification is you can sell your food a value-added product, a certified organic product without having to actually create the compost. I mean that literally and figuratively because you can have an organic product that is growing exactly the same as a conventional product
00:20:44
Speaker
but has had organic inputs instead of conventional inputs. And to me that isn't, you know, you may as well just go to Coles or Woolies and just buy the veggies from there that haven't been sprayed or whatever it is. To me, there's no real difference. Does that kind of make sense to you what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, the integrity is being sucked out of it. Like you could have an organic egg that's been laid by a chicken in a cage because it got fed organic feed.
00:21:10
Speaker
You know, so like, what do you want? Do you want an organic egg from a tortured chicken or do you want an organic egg from a chicken that's being able to express its chicken-ness? So, you know, when I, when I, maybe I'll, I'll quickly tell you about the five pillars of production on our farm and it might give you a bit of an idea about where we come from.
Five pillars of Jake's farm
00:21:27
Speaker
Yeah, let's do it.
00:21:28
Speaker
I call it our flywheel and obviously a flywheel is a little mechanical contraption that generates its own, it keeps generating and adding to its own momentum. So our first pillar of production and they all get shorter. So I'll talk about the first one for a few minutes, but then they all.
00:21:44
Speaker
Shrink up the first one's animal welfare for us when we're making a decision on the farm. You can't get on to decision matrix number two unless you address number one properly and animal welfare for us is more than outcome based metrics like the caged egg facilities probably have some of the best outcome based metrics in the whole egg production.
00:22:05
Speaker
industry because it's so highly regulated and quarantined and medicated that if you're looking at outcome-based metrics, maybe it's mortalities per thousand, they probably look the best. But you could say, in my facility, there's been no bicycle accidents. There's been no theft. There's been no murders.
00:22:32
Speaker
No one's even said a cruel word to each other, and our metrics are fantastic, but you've got all your people in solitary confinement 24 hours a day. So how moral is your system? How ethical is your system? So I don't really buy into that outcome-based metrics. For us, welfare is you need to look at the natural expression of the species in context to its natural environment. So an example of that would be pigs are species that come from Europe,
00:23:02
Speaker
and live in forests. So a pig is an outside animal. It's an omnivore. It's social. It wallows. It eats fungus. It roots around in the ground. And so many of those expressions actually directly feed back into that animal's health.
00:23:22
Speaker
If you don't give the pig the opportunity to stick its snout in the ground, it's going to need an iron injection very early on in its life because it becomes instantly anemic, an iron deficient. But if you let a pig stick its nose in the ground, you've just mitigated that input.
00:23:39
Speaker
If your pig has fleas or lice or ticks or is susceptible to sunburn, you could create it a wallow and it could lay down and go to its own homemade beauty salon and put its own full body mud mask on and suffocate all those parasites and basically apply sunscreen and protect itself from parasites in the sun. The animals have all the tools to look after themselves, but we've removed them from those environments.
00:24:03
Speaker
So for me, step number one is looking at the context of the animal in context of its environment. Step number two, after animal welfare, we call our environmental backbone. This is really simple. You know, we want to be stewards of our environment. We want to rehabilitate our environment to
00:24:21
Speaker
take it back to its natural expression and make it more productive and more fertile so we can grow more produce on it. And I don't believe we have to do anything real special to do that. I just believe if we look after step number one, number two will be fine. So an example of that is we're going to take a migratory herbivore like a cow
00:24:44
Speaker
And we're going to move it around the farm really quick so it doesn't sit in the same pasture all the time. And that's looking after the welfare of the animal because you're mimicking its natural expression. And by proxy, your paddocks are going to get longer recovery periods and you're going to grow more grass. So you've looked after the animal.
00:25:01
Speaker
By proxy, the environment is doing really well too. Step number three is we want to create healing food for our community. We believe food has the power to heal. If you're training to do a triathlon, you're not going to be drinking copious amounts of alcohol, eating KFC every lunch because you're not going to be able to stick to your training regime.
00:25:22
Speaker
you're going to be eating meat and eating light salads and drinking filtered water and making sure you're outside all the time moving. So, you know, humanity knows you are what you eat and what you eat makes you feel better, but we're trying to mask that with protocols and pharmaceuticals. Yeah. You know, we're trying to be the same into the same kind of
00:25:47
Speaker
mindset as farming has, right? Like we're following the same trajectory as farms had, and it's all connected in that way. We've got vets and doctors, right? They're both doing the same thing. Step number four for us is we want to build community. We believe that by being transparent and maintaining integrity-based systems on our farm, that if we look after animals in contact to their natural expression,
00:26:11
Speaker
if we steward our environment and create a great product that we're naturally going to build community, we're not homesteaders, we're not isolationists, we want friends, we're social beings, we want a support network, we want a community and a tribe around us. And number five, like I said earlier, is we want to be profitable and we also want to showcase that for other budding young farmers because it's not easy.
00:26:35
Speaker
to start from the get-go without inherited land, without equity, without land, livestock, without generational knowledge. And so we started without a few of those things. We did have land, I guess, within the family, but I leased that at market rate for my parents. I purchased my animals. We learned the lessons as we go, so we're quite open and transparent.
00:27:00
Speaker
through social media and our farm tours about the economics behind our operation and if we can inspire anybody by giving them a little bit of a mud map, that's something that means a lot to us. But everything, as I explained, stems back to animal welfare.
00:27:15
Speaker
Mm. Speak a little bit about, cause I always find this very interesting. Uh, when you say the animals have the tools they need to keep themselves healthy, like, and you talk about, uh, pigs making themselves like mud baths and, and, you know, uh, cattle moving from pasture to pasture. Um,
00:27:34
Speaker
You know, a lot of these farms that do improve parshes will plant fields and fields of the same variety of grass or, you know, they'll have one variety of grass in one field and a different variety in another. Speak a little bit about what makes regenerative agriculture different in the way that maybe they feed their cattle.
00:27:56
Speaker
Well, you know, if you're planting out crops for your animals and you're feeding them on, you know, like a monoculture, um, loosen to get them fat really quick. It's something that might be really nice in the short term, but I'll speaking to a farmer the other week that just finished lambing and it was such a good season and he grew so much nice grass that a heap of his, uh, use his mother sheep had prolapse.
Animal health and welfare in farming practices
00:28:19
Speaker
Um,
00:28:20
Speaker
While they're going through lambing with their babies, they've had prolapse and they've had to be put down because of, air quotes, animal welfare reasons. They shouldn't have had prolapse in the beginning. Why were they just fed chocolate bars 16 hours a day? The answer is economics because it made sense for that farmer to put out that crop and fertilize that crop and grow them really fat really quick, but that's just not the natural expression of the animal.
00:28:46
Speaker
to rely on, I guess, animals looking after themselves with the tools that they've been given, you really have to start with the right animal. If you're going to start a really tight rotational grazing program and you don't want to be drenching,
00:29:02
Speaker
and putting all these inputs and labor management into your animals but you're starting with final marinos you're gonna have your work cut out for you because those animals have had a crutch for the last fifty years and that crutch was called intensive management.
00:29:17
Speaker
because they're so highly valuable because of their wool crop every year that farmers will bend over backwards to help them stay alive through a rough season or to help them through a rough lambing or whatever it is. On our farm, we don't really have improved pastures. Every now and then we'll sow a multi-species cover crop as a bit of an experiment, see if we can grow more forage to feed more animals per hectare.
00:29:39
Speaker
We're very conscious and careful that when we do that, we'll say anywhere from 12 to 20 different varieties of plants in that one crop to make sure that there's a biodiversity that animal to graze on. It's not a natural thing for an animal to have a monoculture diet.
00:29:58
Speaker
I don't know if that really has answered your question, but for me, when you're expanding on animal welfare and you're looking at the context of that animal, one of the very first questions I ask is, is this animal fit for purpose? Because if you're going to take an animal that's not fit for purpose and expect it to look after itself like its brethren in the wild might,
00:30:20
Speaker
you're going to potentially have really bad outcomes. So a really easy example of this is my broiler chickens, my chickens that are raised for meat. They're very different from a hen and they're very different from any wild pheasant you're going to see. They can't fly. They can barely perch. From hatching to processing at two kilos of weight is under 60 days. So these are birds that are very different from any bird you're going to see in the wild. So if I put them on my farm and treat them like I would a pigeon,
00:30:49
Speaker
They're all going to fall over and die miserably. I've got a really bad welfare example on my hands. That's why I say when you look at the animal, you have to look at its natural expression and its environment and its capacity and decide how you're going to treat it. We're currently getting into the lamb business. We bought some yews that we're not drenching.
00:31:10
Speaker
We're not giving them any pharmaceutical help, and they're on unimproved pastures, and at the moment, they're as fat as you could hope. They're round. It looks like they're almost rolling around in the paddocks instead of walking, and that's because of the species and the genetics that we've accessed. If we were to start a breeding operation with something like a fine ball merino,
00:31:31
Speaker
they would probably currently be struggling in our unimproved pastures because their genetics for the past 50 years have been managed so beautifully well. I'm not critiquing necessarily the merino farmers because the ability to grow the quality of pasture year and year out that they've done for their lambs, even though I don't like the amount of inputs and everything that they've done, it's extremely complicated. They've done really a tremendous job, but that just doesn't align with our values on farm.
00:32:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't think where, you know, it's not a criticism of other farmers, like you say. I think it's more a criticism of, you know, the marketing of major corporations and probably the tricksterism that goes into that. Like on your point about, you know,
00:32:18
Speaker
animals like pigs, you know, there was a marketing campaign that ran for a long time where it was like pork, the other white meat. And I remember my first time seeing, it's very difficult in Queensland. I don't know how it is in New South Wales to actually source organic pork. You can get free range pork, but it's very difficult to find organic pork. And I remember the first time seeing it and cooking it, it was still pink at the end. And that really showed me that
00:32:47
Speaker
Well, firstly, I'd kind of come to the conclusion myself that
00:32:52
Speaker
you know, it was at the same time as red meat, you know, was supposedly causing everyone health conditions. And so their way of differentiating pork from red meat was to call pork a white meat. And so you have to feed pork a non-species specific diet to make it white, right? Like how can you produce white meat from pork? It's almost redder than beef when it's finished, right?
00:33:18
Speaker
In so far as what you're talking about with Merino, what you're really talking about is sacrificing the durability of the animal for the wall. Is that really what you're saying?
00:33:32
Speaker
Well, it's a trade-off. When they're breeding marinos over generations, what are they focusing on? They're focusing on aspects like wool quality. So they're measuring the microns of the wool fiber and going, everyone wants to have the best wool because it fetches the most in the market.
00:33:49
Speaker
They're focusing things on like surface area. The more wrinkles you can breed the sheep to have, the more surface area each sheep has. So the more wool you get off each sheep, you focus on things like fertility because that underpins the profitability of your system. So if you could get two lamps instead of one, you're twice as good off. The things you're not focusing on because you can only do so much. There's only so many hours in a day and you've got to select for certain metrics.
00:34:17
Speaker
They're not focusing for things like parasites or disease resistance or feed conversion efficiency. And so being somebody who's selling meat and whose private primary, I guess, guiding star is animal welfare.
00:34:33
Speaker
I couldn't give two hoots about micron fiber quality or surface area. I want to have a sheep that I don't need to cut its tail off to make sure it doesn't get eaten alive by maggots. I want a sheep that can eat unimproved grass and get as fat as a pig and enjoy its life. I want a sheep that doesn't need help lambing, and I want a sheep that's not just going to get wormy and need pharmaceutical inputs just because it brushed its nose on the ground.
00:35:01
Speaker
It's just a change of priorities. The beef industry has gone through a few different things, but something that's happened over the years is that we keep selecting for larger and larger weaning weights because you get paid on your weaning weights, really, if you're selling your animals at that time.
00:35:17
Speaker
And if you're focused on having the largest weiner calf, by proxy, you're going to pick the largest birth weight calf. And a consequence of that is you've got mama cows that are going to be pushing out bigger calves than maybe what they ought. So like, why should a farmer have to pull a calf out of a cow?
00:35:36
Speaker
You know, like a mother animal should be able to push out a baby animal. That's just a primary function of breeding. So obviously there's always going to be extenuating circumstances and isolated incidences. But, you know, I hunt a little bit and I've never once seen the skeleton of a deer with a, with a foal stuck halfway out of it with them both dead. And I'm sure that's happened somewhere. Someone's going to get on Yahoo and, you know, find that isolated incident.
00:36:02
Speaker
But by and large, that's not a thing. I've spoken to farmers who in the past bred Hereford cattle, and they've had years, they've had complete breeding cycles where their pull rate was 40%.
00:36:17
Speaker
You know, folks, that's not a natural thing. That's human induced. So these farmers were very clever and they figured that out and they fixed it within one or two generations. But the reality is, is they got there because they were selecting for metrics that, you know, that suited the business financial projections and didn't prioritize the animal's welfare. Yeah, interesting. And for me, that really spreads into
00:36:44
Speaker
You know, people get very concerned. I know when I cook a piece of pork now, it's like, well, make sure, you know, whoever you're cooking the pork for, make sure you cook it until it's fully cooked. And people have this idea that, and it's spread from the same thing. It's like, if the pork isn't white, then it's unhealthy and you're going to get sick if you eat it because you need to cook pork fully. And, you know, maybe you need to cook pork a little bit more than you would cook beef.
00:37:13
Speaker
Why do you need to cook pork fully? Because there is a reason why people think that. What other meat do you need to cook fully? Oh, it's probably chicken, right? Chicken. Yeah. The reason you have to cook, the reason that we have this perception that both of those animals need to be cooked fully through is because they live in filthy environments, in indoor sheds laying around in their own feces all day. Yeah.
00:37:33
Speaker
you know, full of parasites and worms because they're inherently unhealthy, unnatural conditions. So, you know, pork has probably been the biggest eye-opener for me in agriculture for all the same reasons that you've just mentioned. You know, our pork scotch on the shelf is as red, if not redder than our beef scotch, just like you articulated. And it's a fattier animal.
00:37:55
Speaker
And the flavor is incredible. The first time I raised two pigs on the farm in one of our front paddocks just for my wife. And I said, when I got married, my wife's a tremendous cook. And I thought, you know, we're going to have kids. We're going to do all this stuff. I've got to stop being such a useless bum. And I've got to figure out how to cook a little bit so I can look after my wife, you know, for those first few beautiful months when she's got the baby and I can be, you know, macho man going around the house cooking stuff and fixing stuff.
00:38:21
Speaker
I thought I'm just gonna pick a handful of meals and I'm gonna perfect them and I'm gonna be like alpha dad and one of the meals that I thought I'd do a really good job of perfecting was pork belly so I got on YouTube and I was watching Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay and you know all these funny chefs and I was buying pork belly from the supermarket and every Thursday night I come home and I cook a pork belly and
00:38:42
Speaker
And the response from my wife and myself was always the same. The meals kept tasting better and better, but we kept feeling like dirt afterwards, and we'd wake up feeling boggy and slow and lethargic, indigestion issues, issues defecating, and just not a great system. And so we stopped eating pork.
00:39:03
Speaker
And then I started growing my own pigs and just as a, you know, you've got the land and you're out there feeding the cows anyway, you may as well throw a bucket of food over the fence for the pigs. And the first time we processed our first two pigs and ate them at home, tasted great.
00:39:18
Speaker
No indigestion, no bowel movement issues, didn't feel bogged down, woke up feeling fantastic like we'd had a nice porterhouse the night before, and off we went. And that was a massive eye-opener for me because like you probably say, and I know Dr. Max Goldhain and I have spoken about this, it's not just you are what you eat, but you are what you eat eats. And that's why we talk about pillar number three being creating healing foods. We believe that there's a difference between eating pork from an animal that
00:39:48
Speaker
not only lives in a shed laying around on concrete flooring, not seeing any fresh air, sunshine or dirt, but an animal that's been specifically bred for that.
Comparing organic and conventional pork quality
00:39:58
Speaker
Contrast that to an animal that lives outside and can handle that and thrive in that environment, eating a varied diet, having sunshine, having soil, having fresh air,
00:40:08
Speaker
They're very different proteins to put into your body. So I've got one lady in town just to finish off my pork ranch. There's one lady in town. She's a beautiful lady. She's about 96 and I supplied her beef about probably two years ago.
00:40:24
Speaker
She's my accountant's mother and just a little cut because she lives alone, quite an elderly lady so she doesn't have a huge appetite. So I gave her a few little cuts of pork and I went back a couple weeks later to give her some eggs and see how she was going. I like checking in on her. She's a beautiful woman.
00:40:42
Speaker
And she said, that pork you gave me was sensational. I haven't eaten pork for 30 or 40 years, but that's as good as ever had. And I said, oh yeah. And she made this comment that her father, so you could imagine if he was, if he were, he would have been born in, let's say 1900 or something, his comments at home was he wouldn't, you can't trust pork unless it's got an inch of fat on it.
00:41:06
Speaker
That was a truism in their home. Unless it's got an inch of fat, it must have been a sick, diseased, malnourished, dirty hog that you wouldn't want a thing to do with. And now when my pigs get delivered to us from the abattoir because they've got more than an eight mil fat cap, they've got a cross next to the delivery slip saying these pigs are no good. The industrial pigs have seven or eight millimeters of fat and ours have more like 11 or 12. We like it with a little bit of extra cover on it because that's where all the flavor is.
00:41:35
Speaker
when you fry your pork chop on your cast iron grill, then you can pour the excess fat into your dripping jar on the bench. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got the same. And you've got your butter for next morning's bacon.
00:41:47
Speaker
Uh, so yeah, I don't know that, that, that's been the other white meat, uh, slogan, which was there to, to sort of bandaid up the fact that pigs can't exercise anymore. And they're eating basically vegetarian diets instead of their natural omnivorous diets. You know, it's a great example of what the industry is capable of. Hmm. Yeah. It's, I could listen to you talk on that all day. And I remember specifically watching.
00:42:12
Speaker
I think I first heard Joel Salison on, on Joe Rogan's podcast, and then that kind of led me to watch the documentary Foodie. And I remember seeing him talk on that documentary about how his farm had been shut down or the FDA in America had, is it the FDA or the USDA, whichever one it was?
00:42:32
Speaker
Um, I think he calls them the US. Um, yeah, yeah. They, uh, they had attempted to shut down his, his chicken operation because he was killing chickens outside. Um, and they said, you know, we're killing, or, or when you look at these, these factory farmed animals, they're killing him in a, in a sanitized environment where you're using stainless steel and everyone's wearing full body suits and face masks and gloves. And so he was like, okay, you know, I will, uh, I'll fold so long as you test.
00:43:02
Speaker
uh, my chickens against the chickens that are coming out of these, out of these factories. And so what he inevitably found or what they found in the end was the chickens that they were producing from these factory farms were something like 2,600,000 parts per million a Coli per gram. Uh, and in the, in the chickens that he was killing outdoors, that was something like 6,000 and it's like just a complete
00:43:30
Speaker
different animal, a night and day difference. And it's undeniable the difference when, when you've got figures like that, you know, you, you're having a chicken that's eating its species specific diet versus one that's probably never walked more than a meter in its life. It's lived on top of other chickens. Uh, it's probably lived in squalor and being diseased its entire life. And people are wondering, you know, why these animals are, well, people aren't even aware that these animals are sick. They're, they're saying, look how great it is. It's so cheap.
00:44:02
Speaker
Yeah absolutely we've we've got a industry that has been designed to be or a society that's been designed to be liability obsessed.
00:44:13
Speaker
So, you know, the metric isn't let's create the most healthy chicken or let's create the most ethical chicken or let's create the most environmentally friendly chicken. Let's create the chicken that's least likely to make somebody sick immediately.
00:44:32
Speaker
So they'd rather poison us slowly and they wouldn't admit to this. And I'm not even saying this in a sinister way. They don't even understand this. They'd rather give us sub hazard food that poisons us slowly and mitigate the liability than potentially giving us contaminated food that could harm us in the short term. And the unfortunate reality is
00:44:55
Speaker
Is that because we're raised in that environment, they're probably right. Like our immune systems probably suck. So we become predisposed to needing that supply system. You know, when I'm at the farm, at the butchery doing a bit of work and like I've eaten beef raw, I'll look at that and I'll go, what does that taste like? I'll just grab a slice of liver off the side of the table. That table's had pork over it.
00:45:19
Speaker
It's had chicken over it. We've done all these different things throughout the day, and it's probably sat out of there in the air for six hours, and I'll grab a little bit and mung on it. And I've never once been sick from any of that. But I really believe that it's all about pasteurizing the food, making sure it's safe in the short term. No one wants to deal with a case where they've poisoned someone to go home, and I don't either.
00:45:46
Speaker
But there's no foresight really about all the other impacts. So at the moment, our chicken enterprise, I've got to get to the farm at 11 p.m., load the chickens into crates, leave the farm at midnight, drive four hours down to Melbourne to get to the abattoir before 5 a.m. and unload the birds. And then one of the boys, whoever does that trip, myself, one of the boys, we have a 60-minute power
Consumer choice and societal health issues
00:46:09
Speaker
nap. We get our empty chicken boxes back, put them in the ute and drive home. We get home about 10, 11 in the morning.
00:46:15
Speaker
And we could easily process them at home in an airborne shed, something similar to what Joel Salatin has, but just, you know, a complete nugget, like it had just never happened. They've got a small state exemption that lets them get around that, but it's just a complete nothing burger here in Australia. But I do have a little setup like that at home where I process my own family's chickens. Like we probably eat 200 chooks a year.
00:46:36
Speaker
So three times a year, we'll get in there and a few friends and I will sit there and we'll just with a little cheap plucker and scolder, we'll process 40 chicks, take three fellas, two hours. And none of us have ever been sick. That's very cool. No one's ever been hurt by it. The chickens are definitely better off.
00:46:57
Speaker
not having to go through that freight trauma. And the birds weren't soaked in a chlorine bath or anything like that. My whole answer for that would be something very libertarian, just as long as it was informed consent, why can't adults get along?
00:47:16
Speaker
Like just as a hypothetical workaround for the scenario, like let's say Jake wanted to do it on his farm and he wasn't abiding by regulations, why couldn't a customer come to the farm and literally inspect us doing it and sign a waiver going, I release liability because I'm satisfied. Yeah.
00:47:36
Speaker
You know, there's so many things. We're letting people have gender reassignment surgery as minors and taking hormone blockers. And we've just got all this crazy stuff happening all around the world, but you can't decide to buy a chook off a guy who's processing it in his backyard under your own inspection. You've got to appreciate some and trust some nameless faceless bureaucrat over yonder to do it for you.
00:48:02
Speaker
In my opinion, and I know there's different points of view on this as well. I think the, you know, on everything you're talking about, but I think the state of the health of our farming and our animals is catching up to the state of our own health in more than one way. And I think, you know, one of the results of that is our passiveness or our total lack of care about things like these
00:48:30
Speaker
In my opinion, atrocities going on and you know, all of these political things that are happening that are just, you know, utterly ridiculous and no one seems to care.
00:48:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's, you know, everyone just wants to stay in their own lane, not make any waves, live and let live, leave me alone. But the reality is, is that didn't, that isn't working so well. No. Every time we get told we can't do something and we go, well, it's just one little thing. We're not going to worry about that because we've still got all these other freedoms, you know, the line just gets drawn a little bit closer to. Yeah.
00:49:04
Speaker
And the liability that we see in our food is, in my opinion, very obviously spreading to a lack of vitality and a lack of care. Almost a total apathy in ourselves. You know, it's easy to walk into a supermarket sometimes and see people, you know, they're almost like just entirely dull, almost like the lights aren't even on.
00:49:28
Speaker
It's like, how can that not happen when you would see this firsthand as well? It's like, you know, what you're eating isn't living. It hasn't lived. And now it's spread over to you. And it's funny what a short period of time it can take from
00:49:47
Speaker
you know, converting back to eating living vital food. And, you know, like I've said before, and I'll probably hear this a million times on this podcast or worry about it a million times, but you know, there's the energy that you get in your food from a from an energetic living animal carries over into you into your own, you know, your own vitality, your own mental and emotional state, your own life force.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Quality feeds into quality.
00:50:22
Speaker
It does matter, but unfortunately, that's not the status quo out there, so we've just got to do the best we can with the lanes that we've got. Interesting, you sort of made the comment before about people in the supermarket. You made some comment that they were lifeless or on autopilot or something like that. My eldest son, Otto, who's almost six, is an incredibly bright
00:50:47
Speaker
energetic, athletic young man and asks 101 questions that I remember sitting in the back of my dad's car when I was about the same age asking him questions and I remember a specific instant and he sort of flipped his lid and he said, stop asking me so many questions. You know, you're getting on my nerves and you keep asking the same question over and over and I've told you a hundred times
00:51:06
Speaker
And I remember just sitting there seething, just like oozing contempt for the way he just spoke to me, thinking to myself, I'll never speak to my children like that. And I'd be lying if I said I haven't fallen short in that regards. Because as a child, you don't realize that dad was
00:51:29
Speaker
overworked and underappreciated and malnourished and burdened by bills and, you know, a child who just asked the same question. Fourteen. I kept asking if I remember it. I almost mean six years old. I remember it like night and day. Could a police officer get you in trouble for this? Could a police officer?
00:51:45
Speaker
But you know, now when my son asks me things, you don't always have the questions and it's a really good thought exercise to actually chase those answers as far as you can. But a thought experiment that I've been working on with my son, and this will probably mortify 99% of polite society. I want to hear it even more now. Is unlike son, some people out there, most people out there are NPCs.
00:52:08
Speaker
And I'm sure you've heard the meme, but he goes, what's an NPC? And I'm like, well, an NPC is a non-player character. When you're playing a computer game, and we have on my phone, he's watched me play a few games, we do a few little things, you know how daddy walks around and he's that guy, yeah. And you know how all those other people are on the screens, but they're not really people, they're just a computer game. So yeah, I said, well, that's how some people just go through life.
00:52:35
Speaker
They're not really in control. They're not exploring on their own intuition. They're not taking responsibility for their actions. They're just existing. It doesn't mean we're better than them. To the flip side, the way I describe it to my son, it's actually the opposite. It doesn't mean that we're better than them. It means if you're around somebody,
00:52:58
Speaker
who's in that mindset you've got a bit of a responsibility there's a little bit of a duty of care to steward that person and be polite and help and not take advantage of that person and it's been actually a really interesting thing watching auto grab that.
00:53:15
Speaker
potentially dangerous lead, I would say, because he's really grabbed to it. And every other day, he goes, David, I am PCs. And like, firstly, I'm like, stop, stop talking so loudly. But he can't scream that out the other side. But he's starting to get, you know, because some people are just in different lanes in life. And some of us are struggling and going through the motion. Because like I said, we're mountain Irish and our light environment sucks. And we're stressed. We're going through a divorce. And our kids are in trouble at school. The dentist wants to replace my four year old's teeth already and all this stuff.
00:53:43
Speaker
And some other people like how I would hope that I'm behaving in my life want to have a little bit more autonomy and responsibility and direction in life. And that's something I think it's a worthwhile thought experiment. And if your children can wrap their head around that in a way that's not jealous or proud, but take that in a way that's, I guess, like humble and empowering, I think that could be a really powerful thing.
00:54:12
Speaker
Um, I do, I do appreciate that analogy. I think, uh, I think it's almost spot on the money. Um, and I like the way you finished off, you know, it's, it's not, you know, it's, we're kind of like trying to get people to, to see like.
00:54:29
Speaker
you know, it could be so much better, right? And again, Max Gullhane and I talked about this last week. It's like people aren't aware of how much better things could be and how much healthier they could be, how much more energetic they could feel if they were participating a little bit more. Tell me- The baseline for health is really low. Yeah. So when they eat something and they feel like dirt, they don't actually realize that they feel like dirt because that's their baseline. And that's what everyone feels like.
00:54:57
Speaker
That's right. So I think I spoke to the boys on the Meet Mafia podcast this morning and I told them that somebody needs to become like the poo guy. It's probably not me. It could be you, Nick. You could become the poo guy. What's a poo guy? So imagine like as a farmer, your head's looking at the ground all the time. When I was a young man, my dad would always hit me in the back of the head and go, stand up straight, stop staring at your feet, put your shoulders back.
00:55:24
Speaker
because I was walking around like I was a bit of a morbid.
00:55:29
Speaker
unit and now I walk around with my head down because I'm looking at my pasture quality, I'm looking at my ground cover, I'm looking at my soil health and I'm looking at the state of my animal's manure on the ground because you can tell about an animal's gut health, its diet, if it's getting enough protein, if it's getting enough fiber, if it's getting too much of some of those things by looking at the state of its manure, the shape of it, the size of it, the regularity of it and we can do that with ourselves.
00:55:57
Speaker
I see a Chinese medicine doctor on occasion. She's helped me a lot with some of my allergies. The first thing, every web consult we do, first thing she says is tell me about your bowel movements.
00:56:08
Speaker
I, uh, I'm going to send this over to you. I sent it, I used it with all my clients. I have an illustrated picture of what your still should look like. And then it has people don't know, people don't know. And then beside that, it has, you know, a picture of what it eats like or what it looks like when you eat, uh, you know, too much fat or too much carbohydrate, or when you have too many dehydrated or highly processed foods and you start to learn to be able to interpret your own still. I'm going to send it over to you because I think you'll like it, but it's a brilliant thing.
00:56:37
Speaker
And I'll share it on social media from allowed to, because I think, well, I think this is worth doing because if you can share that and you can get it in the newsfeed of an NPC, every time they're sitting on the toilet, having diarrhea after picking out at KFC, it's going to come in the back of their heads. Diaries not normal. Like, dude, like I came from that. That was my last. I had sloppy bowel movements for 15 years because I didn't realize it sounds stupid in hindsight, but you've got to take off, you know, you had of pride.
00:57:07
Speaker
No one ever told me. No one ever said your poo's not meant to be like that and I didn't and it didn't hurt me like I didn't have saw a sore stomach or anything. I just would drink heaps of iced coffee out of a plastic bottle at the supermarket and I'd eat heaps of fast food and I had sloppy poos all the time and then when
00:57:24
Speaker
I started being educated and going, well, it needs, it should be regular, it should be formed, yada, yada, yada. And now I've got a really good baseline. Like I know if I drink too much alcohol, like I can smell that the next day. I know what it does to my body, right? So, and I just think that that's a really powerful thing. No one probably wants to talk about it.
00:57:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It's amazing to me how much kickback you get from people who actually won't look at their own stool as well. It's like, why would I look at that? That's disgusting. And it's like, well, that's come out of you. It's what you've eaten. And it's really shocking, I think. And to your point there, it shouldn't actually stink.
00:58:10
Speaker
You know, it's probably not going to smell pleasant, but it shouldn't be so atrocious that you'd be embarrassed if someone else smelled it. Absolutely. Well, you know, poo on the farm doesn't stink. You've got animals eating their appropriate diets and it only stinks if there's an unnatural buildup and, you know, the animals haven't moved. Then you start to, and one of the rules on our farm is your nose knows. Something stinks and it's becoming sour and bitter in the air. It means you've got an
00:58:37
Speaker
anaerobic decomposition so something's rotting and we want things on the farm to have an aerobic decomposition. We want it to compost and smell sweet so your nose knows and it's the same thing on the pastures in our bathrooms.
00:58:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. I've heard some interesting stuff on the olfactory nerve, which is the nerve that goes from, you know, it's one of the cranial nerves. It's your nose straight to your brain. And the olfactory nerve is so important because it gives you an instant ability to know whether what you're about to consume or the environment that you're in is healthy or not. And it's, you know, you've got the ability to smell something before you put it in your mouth. So if it smells inedible, you probably shouldn't be putting it in your mouth.
00:59:19
Speaker
And how we meant to rely on our senses of taste, sight, smell and hearing when we're constantly being fed loud music, deodorant, sweetened and salted foods, you know, like people's faces covered in makeup, like our whole
00:59:41
Speaker
our whole veil that we're meant to observe things through has been skewed. So it's a real process. We're not perfect in our house by any means. It's about making baby steps. And every time you can tuck another thing under your cap, this is where we're at in our journey. And I'll do my farm tools and sort of talk about it. People say, where do I start? I'm like, well, don't look at what we're doing.
01:00:01
Speaker
Because we're doing all these different things. Just start with one thing. Maybe it's cutting sugar out of your diet. Maybe that's the very first thing you need to do. It's going to be really hard for two months. But after two months, it's going to become a reflex. It's going to become part of your nature. And then you can do the next thing, which is filtering your water or watching your sunrise or cutting carbs out or whatever it is. Just one step at a time.
01:00:26
Speaker
It's interesting that you comment on the senses as well because I've made this point before and I think, you know, if I share it with you, you might agree with it, but our senses are so clogged up, right? And you'll by the sounds of it, a fairly intuitive guy.
01:00:40
Speaker
You're trusting your gut in a lot of things, so to speak, and you're using your other senses as well. But when our senses, when our sense of smell is clogged up by artificial fragrances or by deodorants, and our taste is we're eating hyper palatable food, so we've become desensitized to that. Our hearing is affected because we're constantly blasting music in our ears or listening to hyper palatable sounds.
01:01:06
Speaker
All of these hyper-palable things, so to speak, supersaturated affect our, when our system's overloaded, we lose touch with our intuition and then so we stop having the ability to be able to feel what's right or wrong because we lose our intuition.
01:01:23
Speaker
100 percent. This basically feeds back to dopamine addiction, doesn't it? You know, like we're getting dopamine addicted and we're feeding it through every sense we can touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing. And, you know, that's another fantastic rabbit hole for people to go down to to start to dopamine fast. And like everyone's felt their phone vibrate in their pocket when it's on the bench in front of them.
01:01:46
Speaker
because they want to be receiving a text message, but they didn't. So they felt their phone going, and these are all...
01:01:56
Speaker
It's not about right or wrong or anything like that. It's about trying to strip back the senses and are we in our current state fit for purpose, just like I'm looking at different breeds of animals in the paddock and they fit for purpose. We do have the tools to taste or smell or see if something's good or dangerous for us, but probably not if we're addicted to all of these
01:02:21
Speaker
uh, environmental inputs, like we've just, uh, rattled off. So yeah, it's, it's, it's just about a bit of a process and being aware of it's the first step.
Soil health and sustainable farming practices
01:02:29
Speaker
We're on the same path. Talk to me a little bit where we're turning topics again, but that's okay. Uh, hopefully this will be just as interesting. Talk to me a little bit about how you build, uh, healthy soils and how maybe your practices differentiate from, from conventional practices.
01:02:47
Speaker
Well, step number one for us is you need animals. There's this agenda in the media at the moment, demonizing animals and making out that they're bad for the environment, specifically the cow, where everyone's talking about the cow farts and the methane and the carbon and all this sort of nonsense. If you're an environmentalist, you should be able to step back and look at the grand picture of things and understand very quickly that
01:03:15
Speaker
You know, animals are the environment. How can they be bad for the environment when they are in the environment? What's bad for the environment is factory farms and animals, the human animals, short-cutting those natural systems for the sake of efficiencies or, you know, centralization or profit or whatever it might be.
01:03:36
Speaker
Step number one for building healthy soils for us is by having animals on the farm, but not only having animals, but having lots of animals. So we love the fact that we can graze a paddock with cattle and get the cows to eat all the varieties of grasses that they want and put down all their cow manure. And then we can have the sheep come through and they'll select different varieties of grasses.
01:03:56
Speaker
and put down different manure and then we can have the chickens come through and eat different things again and put down chicken manure and that animal is just getting stacked like layers in a cake. That paddock is just being laid and laid and laid with fertility and the reality is in our context is most of those animals don't actually take resources from the next. They're actually hand in hand building fertility, increasing resources.
01:04:23
Speaker
as the farm matures, something else apart from stacking animals on the farm is jealously maintaining a ground cover. So we never want to graze our pastures all the way down to the ground and then you've just got bare soil. We want to make sure that when we're grazing a plant that we're leaving enough of that plant behind that it covers the soil because there's a permaculture saying that mother nature's modest and she wants to cover herself.
01:04:49
Speaker
She's not a promiscuous woman that wants to show all of her skin. She's a modest lady. If you bear mother nature off, you're going to have broadleaf weeds come in, fast-growing weeds that will cover her soil for her. Now, those weeds in and of themselves aren't bad things. They're just plants in nature performing a role. The reason farmers don't like them is if it becomes a monoculture on your farm and your animals get a gutful of them,
01:05:14
Speaker
is you know the nitrogen heavy and your animals get blown get sick so you know a little bit in your diet find that the cows do quite well on them and actually look for them in my experience. Something else to do is we don't tell.
01:05:27
Speaker
don't throw ploughs in the ground and disturb the soil. We don't want to break it up. We want to incorporate nutrients from the top down, not plant them straight inside. I guess they're the main things. Have animals, don't till it, and maintain the ground cover are probably three really good cornerstone chores on the farm to grow fertility.
01:05:52
Speaker
I really took away from my stint in farming was how much water we had to apply to the land. And Cane's obviously a crop that requires a lot of water. But when you're plowing or when you're tilling soil a lot, you're losing a lot of water. And so it's probably not just the loss of water from opening up the dirt as it is.
01:06:16
Speaker
the dirt inability to hold water and the reason for that being that it's bare dirt, right? So I'm probably going to butcher this figure or this statistic, but I believe a healthy soil is supposed to be somewhere around 6% humus. And you might have an idea or a better idea than me as to whether that's wrong or right. But the water holding capacity of humus is far higher than what it is of normal soil. And so
01:06:44
Speaker
What we're seeing in conventional agriculture with application of huge amounts of water, you know, megaliters upon megaliters of water is a real, you know, they're losing water to the environment because the soil doesn't have that innate holding capacity because it's literally bare dirt. It's almost like sand.
01:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Carbon, I can't remember the statistic just like you could, but every percent of carbon you add to your soil per hectare is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of liters of water of retention capacity that that soil has. And every time you till your soil or expose it through overgrazing or burning or whatever it might be, a lot of your carbons leaching into the atmosphere and you're losing your soil holding capacity.
01:07:34
Speaker
your water holding capacity in your soil. And that's, you know, you can see this night and day on our farm, even in just small water cycles. If you walk out of my farm tomorrow morning, and this is essentially true year round, maybe bar a small stint in the hottest part of summer, but you can walk around the farm early in the morning and there's dew, you know, water sitting on all the leaves of all the grasses all over the paddock. But when you come to one of our dirt roads up there,
01:08:03
Speaker
car drives around that immediately
01:08:07
Speaker
next to this plant, bone dry. You could get down in your hands and knees and blow it and dust it blow away. So on one hand, your boots are getting soaked through and wet and boggy and 10 millimeters to the side, it's bone dry and there's no water there. And it just shows you the power of that living leaf on top of the ground. And what's underpinning that is soil quality and water carbon.
01:08:35
Speaker
And I'm not against throwing a little bit of water around. I've got one big pond on our farm that we've never thrown a pipe into to pump water out of. And I'm looking at it going, geez, there's a lot of water sitting there and every time it overflows, it floods my shed. And that water, if we irrigated that on our covered pastures,
01:08:56
Speaker
would actually be getting involved in the water cycle because that water would be consumed by the plants in the soil and then released back into... It'd either go down into the water table or be released back into the environment through precipitation and it'd rain on the next guy's farm and get on with it. But having those bare open crops that just get...
01:09:17
Speaker
millions of liters dumped on them all the time. It's a big environmental expense. I'm always fascinated by this and probably more fascinated by the fact that many people I've talked to don't seem to be able to get their head around the idea that you don't have or regenerative or organic beef or animal farmers don't have to drench their animals. How do you get around it?
01:09:48
Speaker
Well, I've never drenched an animal in, um, you know, since 2019, we started farming and there's basically two, well, there's, there's three ways that we get around it. The first way is quick rotations. So we don't leave animals in paddocks very long. They're in there for a day.
01:10:09
Speaker
for cattle and other big animals. They're in there for one day, grazing that pasture, knocking it down, and then we move them away. And the reason that move is important is while they're in that paddock.
01:10:21
Speaker
they're defecating and putting their manure down. And the parasite eggs that are coming out of their intestinal tract through their manure, when they hit the ground, they'll start hatching. Parasites will start moving around on the plants. And then when they're coming back, the cows are coming back to next to where they pooed three or four days later to grab another bite to eat. They'll be ingesting more parasites. Their parasite load increases.
01:10:44
Speaker
and it starts to become detrimental to that animal. It's like all animals, including humans, have a parasite load or like a bacteria load or whatever it is. It's just whether you can handle it or not. It's whether it's a healthy load or not.
01:10:58
Speaker
So it's moving them. The second part is a recovery period. If you graze them in one paddock for one day and then move them away, that's fine. But if you bring them back 10 days later, those parasites are still there. That time needs a bit of a recovery period to get over that. So it's grazing management. The second thing is keeping them out of water. We fence off all riparian areas on the farm because if you let your sheep walk into a pond,
01:11:21
Speaker
and have a little drink and then they're all going to stand there peeing and pooing at the same time because this is what they're going to do and then when they come back for tomorrow's drinks, all their brothers and sisters have all peed and pooed in the same pond and they're going to be drinking back in those same eggs and parasites that they've excreted the day before. So it's pasture management, it's water management. The third thing is, are the animals fit for purpose?
01:11:46
Speaker
You can move your animals really quick and give them clean pasture. But if you've got that fine wool merino that for 50 years no one's ever thought about is a parasite resistant and they've been drenched every six months. So they've had a hundred back to back drenches over the last 50 years.
01:12:02
Speaker
You're gonna have an animal that can't handle even a small natural load to what the species would have been evolved or designed to handle. So it's about also having an animal that's fit for purpose. So fit for purpose animal pasture management, water management.
01:12:19
Speaker
And you know, drenches and an issue. So we've had zero issues with cattle because they're such a big anti fragile animal with so much vigor and capacity. With sheep, we've had a bit more of a couple of extra challenges in the sense that 99% of the time the animals are fine, but there's the odd animal that just can't seem to hack it.
01:12:41
Speaker
And we don't want to, even though we are dogmatic, that we don't want to drench on our farm because we don't want, you know, when you drench an animal and that manure's on the ground, the dung beetles don't need it. Sits there forever. It oxidizes all those nutrients tied up in that manure oxidize and vaporize into the atmosphere.
01:12:57
Speaker
So we are quite dogmatic, we don't want to use drenches on our farm, but we're also dogmatic that we don't want that animal to suffer and be emaciated by the intestinal worms or whatever it might be. So we just send that animal as soon as it looks like it's slipping straight off to the abattoir, process it, turn it into mints and sausages, and we know that we've selected the better animals that are left behind in our breeding program as a result.
01:13:22
Speaker
Yeah, very cool. So how do you go about selecting varieties? And I know you run, I can't remember the name of it, but a variety of cattle from South Africa. Talk a little bit about how you specifically selected them and what you selected for.
01:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, well, Dr. Max actually went to a farmer's market up north and spoke to a Brian Tasha of Eastwell Farms up there about his cattle. And he called me and said, Jake, I found the apocalyptic cow because Max and I had conversations that
01:13:56
Speaker
what cow would fare the best if an apocalypse happened and there was no drenches, there was no vaccines, there was no farmers to pull carbs when they're carving in winter and all these sort of inputs, these animals get no one to manage feed, yada, yada, yada. What animal would do best? And I'm like, well, it ain't the animals that I'm looking at. And I couldn't really come up with much and he met
01:14:21
Speaker
The farmer up there who said, these Nguni cows, they're the post-apocalyptic cow. And Max thought, great. So he called me and said, I found it. I Googled it, found a breeder and bought my first bull the very next day. And Bombvoo, the Red Nguni, threw him in the paddock and all of his calves are about four or five months old now. They're running around the paddock, cracking little calves. And they're just an animal that's been bred in South Africa.
01:14:45
Speaker
by white man westerners very recently and before that that was stewarded by natives with no inputs available to them. So they've just been bred in very specific environments under very sort of, I guess, complementary goals to what my goals are on the farm. And so, you know, that animal is just as vigorous and as robust as you might hope. Now, what's the trade off?
01:15:15
Speaker
They're small, like they're quite small animals. They might be anywhere from 30 to 50% smaller than a British cow, like a short horn or an angus. That actually suits me fine. I really like the idea of having more small animals than fewer big animals for a range of reasons.
01:15:30
Speaker
that maybe the meat marbling might not quite be where people, if people are going out to a fancy restaurant ordering, you know, 12 plus Wagyu out of a feedlot in Japan, the Inguni steak next to it might not look like quite what they like, but I can't wait to do some nutritional panelling on our Inguni because I've got this hunch that it's going to stack up next to something maybe like a wild harvest deer. I think that the genetics and the environment, I think it's actually going to punch
01:16:00
Speaker
really high because it hasn't been bred towards intramuscular fat. Intramuscular fat, although it's delicious and looks superb. For me, it's really a sign of pre-diabetic mobility. If you looked at that in a human, you'd be like, dude, you've got issues.
01:16:19
Speaker
So I just look at that in our cows and I go I don't know if that's the best thing of what we should be aiming for Sheep was a bit harder because as I said earlier, you know sheep sheep, you know Australia and New Zealand's economies were built on the back of sheep and they've been You know, so
01:16:37
Speaker
I don't know what the right word is, jealously, jealously guarded, not in a bad way, but they've been so highly coveted for so long because they're such brilliant animals that in the things we've selected for, we just don't have animals that are really robust in that way. So I was actually seriously looking at going right out into towards central Australia, some of these big ranches that have tens of thousands of sheep that they only see once a year and buying those animals.
01:17:04
Speaker
because they're just not getting all this hand holding. And then I found a local farmer that's got a composite of shedding sheep called catalyst and it's got a few different breeds in it like dauper and demara and Aussie white and all these different things. And I've been so impressed with them since I've had them on the farm these last few months. I've got them trained behind hot wire, they're eating a bit of ratty feed that grew over summer and they're as fat as can be and they've just started lambing and no issues there.
01:17:31
Speaker
But it's a bit of a process to find these animals. If anyone's listening and wants to get into animals, don't go on Gumtree and buy projects. You know, everyone goes and buys some animals off some backyard because it's easy and accessible and cheap. If you want to maintain healthy farming systems on your property without relying on pharmaceuticals, you can't be taking on sick project animals. You need to start from a position of health.
01:17:56
Speaker
So, you know, you can message me and I'll, I can give you some referred producers around the place that I could direct you to, but you really want to start with quality animals.
Raw milk benefits and legal aspects
01:18:05
Speaker
Yeah, very cool. As far as... Just do it. You know, milk sounds like probably the only thing you don't produce for yourself. Is that, is that on the money?
01:18:16
Speaker
Well, I buy dairy cows. I buy what the industry calls choppers. So when a jersey, let's say like one of those smaller frame 10 colored milking cows, which make that nice fattier milk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When one of them is getting culled from the dairy, there's two dairies that I work with locally. They'll send me a list of all their cull animals, most of them cull twice a year. And they're culling for a range of reasons. They're getting rid of animals because of things like a foot abscess,
01:18:45
Speaker
cancer, recurring mastitis, or maybe just simply because the cow didn't get pregnant, which means it's not going to have a gestation, which means it won't have a lactation. And they're the ones that I buy. So I'm buying animals that have a little bit of a fertility handicap, and I joined them with my inguiny bulls on my farm.
01:19:04
Speaker
and I get on my first crosses, my Nguni jersey, I've got about 40 of them on the property at the moment and I'll have another 40 at the end of the year come through or more than that, probably have another 60 come through. Every now and then, one of them will catch my eye and be extra friendly and she'll stand there while I milk her. So we do get a house care sometimes and we can drink that milk at home.
01:19:27
Speaker
I've been lactose intolerant since since I learned that it was a thing. Like I said earlier, I thought when I used to work in the bike shop, we'd send the boys down to the corner shop to buy us a bottle of hungry squirties. You know, the hungry thirsty. We all call it hungry squirties because it gave us diarrhea and we thought that was funny.
01:19:44
Speaker
We didn't think there was anything wrong with that. And then I realized that I had a bit of a lactose intolerance and even if I just had, you know, half a cup of X milk out of the fridge without it being full of, you know, caffeine or whatever it is that it would still have that same effect of me. When I started drinking
01:20:03
Speaker
unpasteurized milk from a grass fed cow out of the paddock, zero issues, which I just think is such a curious thing because when we're talking about liability centric production systems, dairy is a huge one, right? You can't drink our milk unless we heat it to whatever it is, 62 degrees and make it safe. That stuff
01:20:24
Speaker
won't kill you. It won't give you a bacterial infection that'll kill you. You just can't digest it anymore because the lactobacteria has been nuked to hell. When you drink homemade raw milk, all of a sudden everyone can digest it. It tastes delicious and it feels great. But there's always this looming concern that maybe there's some sort of bacteria in it. But if we went back to when I hand milk a cow,
01:20:53
Speaker
We're talking about the senses again. I can feel her teats.
01:20:57
Speaker
You know, cows are all milked in our system by machines. When I'm milking one, I can feel it and if they're warm, I can feel a bacterial infection coming. When I'm milking it, I can see if it's lumpy and then I'm smelling it and I can smell if it's sour, if it's off for some reason, I can see the condition of the cow. There's a lot of senses there to interpret the health of the milk. And beyond that, if you want to talk about some sort of fail safe in the system, you can just buy these little, you know, $2 Petri dishes.
01:21:26
Speaker
and squirt a little squirt of milk from each other into each quarter of the Petri dish and if it goes blue it's safe and if it goes red it's not. These systems that outlawed raw milk 30 years ago haven't kept up with modern science. We've got the systems where we could at scale be protecting ourselves
01:21:47
Speaker
But anyway, we don't do milk commercially to answer your question. This was a topic that I was hoping we'd come back to because I love the topic of raw milk and I'm an advocate for it.
01:22:02
Speaker
I think I remember seeing in the same documentary Food Inc. with Joel Salatin, a farmer talking about having the Federal Drug Administration rock up to his shop or to his farm or whatever it was. And they basically treated him like he was a drug dealer when he was selling raw milk.
01:22:21
Speaker
And, uh, I remember when I, when I first discovered raw milk, there's an area here, uh, in Queensland. It's actually not far from Brisbane. I think it's in Gympie called, uh, Cleopatra. And, uh, and they, they sell what is what they advertise as bath milk, but it's, it's, it's warm milk that you can actually drink. And so that's how they, they can sell it. Hopefully I'm not getting anyone in trouble, but.
01:22:42
Speaker
Well, you might not want to dox them, you might want to blur that out because in Victoria down here, they've actually made bath milk illegal too because they're aware of the loophole. Yeah. Well, you know, I remember going and specifically sourcing this milk because as a kid, I loved milk and our family, you know, I'm one of five and we would buy like, I don't know, 10 bottles, 10 three litre bottles of milk a week.
01:23:10
Speaker
And, you know, we drink milk with every meal. But, you know, it wasn't it wasn't great quality milk and it didn't affect me so much as I would get, you know, running tools from it or diarrhea or lactose intolerance. But it just, you know, it would it would make my mouth itchy and it would like it would give me symptoms like a runny nose and things like that. And so I remember specifically sourcing this milk and going to the shop that had it. And it was like a
01:23:39
Speaker
like an organic grocery store or something and I bought this bottle of milk and then they had a cafe there as well and I don't know what sort of treats they were selling but I think I bought this piece of cake and then I sat down and opened this milk in the cafe and drank it and ate this cake and you know the people who worked there were kind of looking at me like I was a you know a wild man or a zoo animal or something like that but it's it's you can't
01:24:03
Speaker
I mean, I can't say that you can't get sick from drinking it because that's not entirely true. But if you source high quality raw milk from a Jersey cow that you know has been looked after well, then it's very unlikely that you'll get sick from it.
01:24:20
Speaker
The raw milk story is such a rabbit hole. And I can't remember the name of the book, but I read this brilliant book about it talking about how it initially became dangerous. But essentially, inner cities in the USA used to have pasture in them. We're talking back turn of the century because they didn't have sophisticated refrigeration supply chains or freight networks. And they'd keep cows close to the city people grazing grass, milking them.
01:24:47
Speaker
And then the land became valuable. They chopped it up, developed it. And that was at the time where prohibition ended and they started making alcohol again and having all these spent grains. Let's put the cows in the sheds. Let's take them off pasture. Let's take them off soil. Let's take them out of sunshine, fresh air, feed them the spent grains, milk that cow.
01:25:07
Speaker
and deliver it to people. And at that time in culture, it was really trendy to not wet nurse your child, to not breastfeed your child. It was trendy to feed them third party milks. And so they had all this anemic, lifeless, grain fed, you know, from sick animals, this feed coming into the babies, making the baby sick, killing babies, when really, you know, mum should have been the filtration system for that baby. Mum should have got a little bit sick instead of baby dying if natural principles were followed.
01:25:37
Speaker
and it just became inherently unhealthy. And you also think about how they used to handle milk. They used to take it in a glass jar, put it at your doorstep in the sunshine, and you'd go and grab it three hours later, whatever it might be. And for the most part, that was fine. That shows you how anti-fragile and robust milk actually is. Most people, if they left milk on the bench now for 30 minutes, they'd tip it down the drain because they'd think there's something wrong with it. Same as eating a little bit of pork that's a little bit pink.
01:26:03
Speaker
or a raw piece of liver or whatever it might be so we've lost our food intelligence because we've never been surrounded by it and we haven't been coached but also the systems have sort of found us in that regard so there's the legislation around the pasteurization of milk.
01:26:19
Speaker
is antiquated. It's surrounded by old practices, old dogma, old technology, but nothing's ever going to happen around that, so everyone just needs to... Interestingly, in my state, I live in New South Wales, raw goat milk is legal.
01:26:34
Speaker
Are you okay? You can just go to the local health store and buy yourself a liter of goat milk and get on with it. You know, the funny thing is, I suppose you're almost lucky in a way because I think goat milk and sheep milk for people who are lactose intolerant, those milks are almost closer to human milk and so they're supposed to be slightly more tolerable. Do you drink it?
01:26:55
Speaker
A little bit. When we don't have a house cow, I get a type of milk from a local store called Owl Cow and it's from a single jersey herd and it's not pasteurised. There's a new
01:27:10
Speaker
process to, I don't know, air quotes, make it healthy and it's called cold pressing. Yeah. So they under cold, they pressurize it under a cold environment, which doesn't pasteurize it, but it does something to it. And that's delicious. And that actually sits with me really well. Doesn't disagree with me at all. So we drink that at home. A little bit of goat's milk. I breed dogs. I breed standard schnauzers for the pet market.
01:27:33
Speaker
And we, whenever we've got a lactating bitch, we give her essentially a raw goat's meal ad lib as much as she wants because the bacteria and the life in it is exceptional and it really helps them out with their calcium requirements while they're lactating. Yeah, very cool.
01:27:53
Speaker
I guess one of my final questions for you would be on the health of your kids. You know, they've probably been almost raised on very high quality food, regeneratively raised food. And I suppose they probably chase data around the farm a little bit as well. What sort of difference do you see perhaps between your kids and other kids who aren't quite as lucky?
Raising children on regenerative food and health benefits
01:28:19
Speaker
My boys are brutes and and they're vigorous boys full of vitality and I think the lion's share of that stands for my wife who's a very You know organized strict Diligent woman she's bit over seven months pregnant at the moment and she's getting up for 30 in the morning three days a week to go to a gym session before she goes to work now in our community
01:28:43
Speaker
kitchen at the restaurant and she's always at home pickling and preserving and getting the boys to get outside of exercise so I think I think a lot of that comes from that but you know we also like our boys have never had sugar at home and it's not to say they've never had there's a fine line with all of this and a lot of new wants is required
01:29:00
Speaker
Because the first thing everyone says is, if you don't give your kids sugar, first chance they get, they're going to piggy out on it and they're going to be predisposed to that. It's like that doesn't mean our kids never had anything sweet. There's things called honey or maple syrup. There's still sweet things out there.
01:29:22
Speaker
You know, our boys have a tremendous amount of high quality protein from the farm. That's the bulk of our diet. And they get a lot of this sweet stuff as well. And my eldest son, Otto, is an absolute brute. He's a big boy. He's very muscular and athletic. You know, when I wrestle with him, feeling his core strength,
01:29:43
Speaker
and contending with his athleticism, like really, it is something quite to behold. My younger son, Theodore, he's got a different stature and he's just a different boy and he's not quite, he's actually, now that he's two and a half, he's starting to fill out and you can see it through, but very rarely sick.
01:30:01
Speaker
We don't have tantrums and wobbling moods. You see the kids at the supermarket that throw themselves on the ground and scream and got snot down their chin. That's not a reality for us. We're probably blessed and fortunate in too many ways to count and I think
01:30:20
Speaker
Many of that reality for us comes from, I guess, social environments for the children as well as their inputs. We're more than the food we eat.
01:30:30
Speaker
And we're very fortunate to have a very involved extended family that loves our kids just like we do. But there's a lot of children that unfortunately fall clean within those NPC guidelines that we spoke about earlier. And I just feel sorry for the kids. We're my wife.
01:30:56
Speaker
goes to the gym. One of the sessions she does every week, she takes our boys with her and they sit in the playground and they play in the playground at the gym. And there's other kids there that are three years old sitting down for the full hour staring at a screen with headphones on. You've got a three-year-old child who took two meters to the right of them. There's half a dozen kids running amok up and down the play set and screaming and carrying on.
01:31:19
Speaker
but their parent has decided that the right thing to contain them and to reduce their liability for the next hour is to put headphones on their head and a screen in front of their face and rob them of the ability to socialize. There's a lot of sad stuff out there happening with the way we're raising our kids.
01:31:37
Speaker
It's interesting that you comment on the the core strength of your kids and I made a post about this recently on Instagram and you know, it's it's it's something that I learnt in my own studies and something that I see carry across to to people in real life, you know.
01:31:53
Speaker
I do less of it now, but I PT as well. And I've worked with people with back pain and that sort of thing. And one of the things that is very common in people with back pain is the inability to turn on their transverse abdominis or the deep intrinsic abdominal muscles, including the pelvic floor. And people will talk about what the reason for this is for months or until the cows come home. It's an endless topic.
01:32:21
Speaker
And, you know, your, your moms are going to get that when, you know, the, the core muscles are going to shut off when they have, um, have kids or whether, whether they have a C-section or something like that. But, you know, one of the reasons why these muscles also shut off is because when the abdominal organs become inflamed due to food intolerance or due to low quality food and all these sorts of things, it causes, uh, inflammation, which is
01:32:44
Speaker
Heat and expansion, right? Which pushes out against the abdominal muscles which prevent us from being able to naturally draw that in when we pick something heavy up off the ground. So what should happen is the umbilicus should draw towards the spinal cord and the whole core should narrow. And so what you see in people who are eating low quality diets is that the umbilicus doesn't draw in. And so when the natural
01:33:11
Speaker
The natural process of tightening the transverse abdominis should happen when you pick up something heavy. It doesn't happen. And so they injure their back and they blame it on the lifting technique, but it's really the food. And so to me, that's really interesting that you comment on the strength of your kid's abdominal strength or their core strength, because I think that's probably got a direct carryover.
01:33:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, they eat a lot of protein and when I wrestle with them, there's no shortage of their ability to turn on their core strength. Something else that I think we could say is directly related to the core strength of my children is having a present father at home.
01:33:49
Speaker
The most exercise my boys get every day fits in a pretty neat one hour window. And it's when I get home from work and I hop on the carpet and belt the crap out of them. You know, like we wrestle and I go hard on them and I'm laying on my back and they're balancing on my feet in the air and I drop them and turn them upside down and tickle them and chase them like a tiger. And we, it's a real workout. Like I get up and then I come and give my wife a kiss and I'm like, I'm flogged. You know, that killed me.
01:34:18
Speaker
It's a really intensive thing. How can I phrase this? This is a natural system. When we're talking about welfare on the farm, mimicking the natural expressions of animals, if you want to have high welfare for your children and the natural expression of what a child should experience, the ideal is a family with two parents.
01:34:44
Speaker
I believe that my children's physical health is a direct result of a two-parent household. My wife worries about the input and I worry about the output. The children reap the reward from that. I think you're smart on the money and I think we could go down another rabbit hole in
01:35:06
Speaker
in diversity in all things, you know, kids who are from single parent households have a lack of diversity and, you know, they're probably more so likely to get, you know, more feminine input. And then so, you know, you're seeing this lack of diversity in
01:35:24
Speaker
In agriculture, monocropping or having only one variety of animal on your farm, spreading to lack of diversity in the household, spreading to lack of diversity in opinion. If you disagree with my opinion, then if my opinion is on the wrong side of what's politically correct, then
01:35:44
Speaker
you know, I get cancelled, and then we see this lack of diversity. We're seeing, you know, I guess you could argue more diversity in gender, but you know, there's, there's, it's, it's a strange state of affairs. And I think it's all, it's all got to do with our health.
01:36:03
Speaker
It's a big web of interconnection. Every specialist, every expert out there thinks that their field is where it starts. The social scientists will think it starts with the relationships at home. The nutritionists will think it's all about inputs. Jack Cruz thinks it's all about sunshine. Every specialist comes back to their own speciality, which I think is really confronting for people when they're wanting to make changes at home.
01:36:32
Speaker
So like the best way I said this earlier and I don't mean to become a preacher, but I'm really passionate about people making changes. The first thing that you feel really convicted to change just in your life, in your lifestyle and your environment, just change that. Don't worry about everyone else. If it's cutting sugar out of your diet, if it's getting up and watching the sunrise.
01:36:53
Speaker
If it's forgiving someone and giving him a cuddle like whatever it is Whatever you're most convicted about and make sense do that nail it Let it become a habit and then the next thing will fall in place about tackle that and you know improve your situation I'll I'll share something with you. That's that's probably a little bit woo-wee, but I think you might appreciate this So you know Jalal Khan, yeah
01:37:16
Speaker
Yeah. So, him and I have talked about this and this isn't my... He's coming down to the farm next weekend. Oh yeah, very cool. So, this isn't my original thought, so I won't claim it, but, you know, he introduced me to Jack Cruise and, you know, Cruise's thing is definitely light. To me,
01:37:39
Speaker
You know, if you're a man of God and you know the Bible, in the Bible, God says the first thing God says is let there be light. And so the thing before the light is the intention to create it or the word. And so what comes before anything is the intention to change. And so that's what you're really talking about is intention.
01:37:59
Speaker
And I think that's kind of cool that you came to that yourself. So the first thing that you feel inspired to change is the thing that you change and that all starts with the intention.
01:38:10
Speaker
You know, meet people where they are, let them start where they were, let them build their own momentum. But it's interesting that passage in that conversation you just brought up because first time I met Jalal and he explained to me light and that's when it all started clicking and making sense to me. And I thought, I love this. And this is sort of the next step in our journey. You know, we started with sugar and then we went on to carbs and then we went on to organics and yada, yada, yada. And I said the same thing to Jalal. It was just like the start of the Bible.
01:38:41
Speaker
cool. Yeah. The light thing is real. The light thing is super woo woo as well. When you first hear it, now I've got a few amazing little testimonies in my own family. My paternal grandmother, so my father's mother who's alive and in her 80s,
01:39:01
Speaker
has been a poor sleeper for decades she saw dr max who said get up and start watching the sunrise outside no sunnies on see how you go and instantly she started sleeping through and has since she started that three months ago after like 40 years of not sleeping through
01:39:17
Speaker
Now, we can get bogged down about whether that's a placebo effect or not. Who cares? She's slumping through. You got the results you want. It's not hurting anybody and it's free. So you'll take it. I lost about six kilos when I started watching sunrises without doing any extra exercise and without adjusting my diet at all. So for me, that was just like, what's going on? This is really strange.
01:39:40
Speaker
and I've just got I've just got line after line of these in my own little personal ecosystem of people having absolute wins with it. My two-year-old Theodore has seen more sunrises in the last four months than I've seen in my whole life. That's pretty cool. I've always been a sleeper. I've never got to see a sunrise and he he comes and tugs in my arm my sleeves to get me out of bed 10 to 6 every morning and we go sit out the back at the moment we get our rugs we put our hoodie on because it's
01:40:08
Speaker
because it's cold, we go sit out the back and watch the sun come up. And as a family unit now, all four of us sit out the back. The sun comes up in Aubrey at 6.27 at the moment. I know exactly what happened. That's actually not too bad. 6.27 is not a bad time to have to wake up. Well, it fluctuates wildly between the minute it moves every day and daylight savings. We've sort of been all over the place, but it's working really well now.
01:40:36
Speaker
That's one of the things you also notice, I think, as you start to get healthy, you know, is how things fluctuate and how things differ day by day. And, you know, the sun's coming up. I don't know what the time difference is, but it's changing as we go into winter, right? And the position of sun and the position of the moon and, you know, the rhythms and everything is changing. And yeah, it's kind of cool. You're entraining yourself into that rhythm as you watch the sun.
01:41:06
Speaker
You know, it goes back to our talk about stools before and, you know, rhythms and cycles and, you know, that's the basis of health. So how cool. A little cool lead for you
Biodynamics and educational concepts
01:41:17
Speaker
to chase there. I don't know if you've done any research into biodynamics.
01:41:22
Speaker
I'm not a biodynamic expert, but we're homeschoolers and Rudolph Stein has written a lot about education and it's very interesting, but the whole biodynamics is really based around light and gravity and everything as well. And again, you've got another thought strain that sounds woo woo, wanting to farm around the lunar cycle, but what controls the tide? Yeah.
01:41:52
Speaker
You know, the tides water controlled by the moon, you know, like it all just sorts to click and they're all marginal gains and they're all little wins, but your stacks one percent long enough and you're really making big strides. I'd really like to talk to a biodynamic farmer. I think
01:42:12
Speaker
You know, I don't know as much about it as I potentially could. Um, but I think, uh, I think there's some gems in there and I absolutely think that Steiner was, was like a true genius. Are you guys using Steiner concepts to, to school your kids?
01:42:30
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I wouldn't say that we're doing a Steiner system, but there's definitely things that he's incorporated into his schooling that we think are really cool. I know an old person that used to run a Steiner school, and one of the things that they did was they
01:42:47
Speaker
When the child started school at seven years old or whatever it was with the teacher, they built their own desk to sit at. And then if they vandalized or damaged the desk, they fixed it. And if they outgrew it, they upgraded it. And that one desk would carry them through their tuition. Now, I don't know if that's a Steiner concept at large or if that's just that specific school's program. But little things like that, I think, are easy to sort of dismiss.
01:43:18
Speaker
as a lot of effort and the results are possibly intangible. That just screams powerful lifelong lesson to me. I'm going to take that one step further. We're going to go mill our own timber. Oh yeah? That's very cool. I bought a mill a couple of years ago, so I've been milling my own timber. We absolutely love it. We'll have a cool project on that.
01:43:42
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. Well, it's been so good to talk to you. I've had a really awesome time. The podcasting thing is really good because it's given me opportunities to have conversations with people who I get along with really well and it's great to talk to people with, you know, similar values and who have stuff to share. So thanks for your time today. Where can people find you before you go?
01:44:08
Speaker
Yeah, look, I'm everywhere. wolkyfarm.com.au. We've got an online store and we're shipping meat into Melbourne. We're hoping to open Sydney up before the end of the year. I've got a blog on there. I've just started blogging a little bit. I'm on Twitter, at Jake Wolkie. Wolkie Farm is on Facebook and Instagram. So, you know, we're sort of in all the usual places. So yeah, pretty accessible. I'm most active on Twitter at the moment.
01:44:36
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thanks for your time. Nick, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. I've enjoyed it. Me too.